Natalie Kuldell

Founder and Executive Director, BioBuilder Educational Foundation

Dr. Natalie Kuldell is a molecular biologist and educator who has combined these two parts of her career into the BioBuilder Educational Foundation, a nonprofit she founded in 2011. BioBuilder’s mission is to inspire students to learn and love life science through innovative, hands-on training programs and tools, bringing its problem-based synthetic biology curriculum to students in all 50 states and 80 countries. BioBuilder’s laboratory kits are distributed by Carolina Biological Supply Company, and its textbook was published by O’Reilly Media in 2011. BioBuilder opened a community Learning Lab in Kendall Square’s LabCentral in 2017, a second in 2021 inside Ginkgo Bioworks headquarters, and a third in 2025 at Allston Labworks in Boston. In 2024, BioBuilder launched BioTechBuilder, a skills-based curriculum which won the 2024 Educator’s Choice “Best of STEM” award for Career and Technical Education curriculum.

Dr. Kuldell studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Cornell, completed her doctoral and post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School, and taught at Wellesley College before joining the Department of Biological Engineering faculty at MIT in 2003. She is the 2020 recipient of the Margret and H.A. Rey Curiosity Award.