Erin Garza

Assistant Professor, J. Craig Venter Institute

Dr. Garza received her master’s and PhD in microbiology from Northern Illinois University. Her graduate work involved genetically engineering biofuel pathways, like homoethanol and butanol, into Escherichia coli. Dr. Garza completed a postdoc at the J. Craig Venter Institute where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Synthetic Biology and Environmental Sustainability departments. Over the years her research has involved genetically engineering bacteria and diatoms to produce compounds of interest, elucidating metabolic pathways in marine organisms, domesticating and characterizing genetic parts for DNA cloning libraries, and developing and optimizing cloning techniques for non-model organisms. However, her main focus now involves studying the microbiome of deep-sea plastics to locate new plastic degrading organisms and studying the effects of plastic additives on the environment and human health.

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