Guest Speakers
2023
Kennedy McDaniel
Sr. Product Manager at Opentrons
Dr. McDaniel is a bio-optimist with the conviction that biology is the future of technology. Her career has focused on developing and launching products at the intersection of biology, software, and hardware. As part of her mission to accelerate the bio-economy, she is focused on developing tools that lower the time and cost required for bio-innovation. This brought her to Opentrons, where she is building the infrastructure to enable reproducible collaborations between biologists.
Howard Salis
Dr. Salis is an Associate Professor in the BioE and ChemE departments at Penn State. His expertise is in the design & engineering of genetic systems in microbial organisms with targeted functions, combining predictive models with massively parallel experiments, for diverse biotech applications. Recent efforts include a "Promoter Calculator" -- a thermodynamic model that predicts transcription initiation rates from arbitrary DNA sequences -- and engineering soil bacteria to detect explosives inside soil systems. He has received the DARPA Young Faculty award and the NSF CAREER award for his notable achievements. He is the founder of De Novo DNA, which runs a widely used design platform for engineering organisms, used by over 10000 researchers to design over 900000 genetic systems.
Associate Professor
Mariana Gomez Schiavon
Assistant Professor, Adjunct Investigator
Dr. Gómez-Schiavon's graduate research explored how organisms can use epigenetics and gene expression stochasticity to deal with fluctuating environments, focusing on the properties and evolutionary emergence of bistable switches. Following her Ph.D. studies, during her postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Hana El-Samad at the U. of California San Francisco, she studied the principles and limitations of cellular feedback control. Currently, she is a group leader at the International Laboratory for Human Genome Research, part of the National Autonomous U. of Mexico, where she aims to understand how the dynamic properties of gene regulatory circuits emerge, proliferate and persist through natural selection. Her work combines evolutionary theory, population genetics, and biophysical models of gene regulatory circuits. Her expertise comprises mathematical modeling of gene regulatory circuits and nonlinear dynamics.
Tom Ellis
Dr. Ellis is Professor in Synthetic Genome Engineering at Imperial College London. Tom has a degree in Molecular Biology from Oxford University and a PhD in DNA-binding Pharmacology from Cambridge University. Tom worked in a drug development company in London, then spent two years as a postdoc investigating synthetic biology at Boston University before starting his own group at Imperial College London. His research team develop synthetic biology and genome engineering tools for Baker’s yeast and apply these in projects to make therapeutic molecules, biological sensors and functional living materials.
Professor
Becky Mackelprang
Dr. Mackelprang leads EBRC’s Security Working Group, bringing stakeholders across academia, industry, and government together to integrate security awareness into the policy and practice of engineering biology. Becky has led the development of commentary and recommendations on issues such as screening by synthetic DNA providers, security during research publication, and ethics in engineering biology research. She has implemented strategies to incorporate security into researcher education and training. Previously, Becky was an EBRC Science Policy Postdoctoral Scholar, an AAAS Mass Media Fellow, a science communication postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and received her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Berkeley.
Associate Director for Security Programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium
Aditya Kunjapur
The Kunjapur lab is expanding the repertoire of microbial chemistry to help tackle problems in human and environmental health. We do this by programming cells to create and harness building blocks that feature uncommon chemistries using a mix of metabolic, protein, and genome engineering in bacteria such as E. coli and Bacillus subtilis. We are also committed to advancing technology out of the lab and into the marketplace through entrepreneurship. Some of our recent recognitions include the 2021 Langer Prize in Innovation and Entrepreneurial Excellence, the 2021 New Innovator Award from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, the 2022 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the 2022 NIH Director's New Innovator Award. We are part of a growing initiative (6+ high-caliber labs) in synthetic biology in the #8 ranked Chemical Engineering graduate program at the University of Delaware, so apply to Delaware if you are interested in graduate education in synthetic biology. For more info, check out our website or the Kunjapur Lab Academy YouTube Channel.
Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
Anne Meyer
Dr. Meyer received her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the MIT. Dr. Meyer served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bionanoscience at TU Delft in The Netherlands, prior to moving her research group to the University of Rochester in September, 2018. She has served as the lead advisor for eight iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Organisms) teams, which have won numerous awards including the 2015 Grand Prize. Her research focuses on using quantitative techniques in the fields of biochemistry, microbiology, and biophysics to study structural dynamics, macromolecular interactions, and physiological responses of organisms to environmental stressors. She also uses tools of synthetic biology to engineer novel functions into microorganisms, with a particular focus on the production of improved, tunable biomaterials and the development of new tools for 3D patterning of bacteria.
Associate Professor, University of Rochester,
Victor de Lorenzo
Dr. de Lorenzo is a Chemist by training and works at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he currently heads the Laboratory of Environmental Synthetic Biology at the National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid. He specializes in Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering of soil microorganisms (particularly Pseudomonas putida) as agents for the decontamination of sites damaged by anthropogenic emissions. At present, his work explores the interface between Synthetic Biology and global-scale Environmental Biotechnology and development of tools and agents to foster such an interface. He is a member of the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) and the American and European Academies of Microbiology, and he has co-chaired with Anne Glover the President's Science and Technology Council of the EC during the Barroso Administration. He has published over 400 articles in scientific journals and specialized books (https://goo.gl/M4sA5N) and he has served as advisor of different international panels.
Research Professor
Tae Seok Moon
EBRC (Engineering Biology Research Consortium) council member and a SynBYSS (Synthetic Biology Young Speaker Series) chair.
Tae Seok Moon aims to solve global agricultural, environmental, manufacturing, and health problems through engineering biology. His research projects have been supported by Gates Foundation, AIChE, and 10 different US agencies (21 external grants), and he has secured >$10M ($35M for the entire teams since 7/1/2012). These projects and his prior research efforts have resulted in 72 publications (61 from WashU as the PI), 133 invited talks, and 10 patents. His achievements have also been recognized with many awards, including a Langer Prize for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Excellence, a B&B Daniel I.C. Wang Award, an NSF CAREER award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a John C. Sluder Fellowship (MIT), an ILJU Foundation Award, an LG Chemical Fellowship, and the SNU President Prize. He also served as a reviewer, editor, or editorial board member for 44 journals, including Nature/Science/Cell journals, Nucleic Acids Res., and PNAS. Notably, his global leadership efforts include 1) his activity and role at EBRC as a Council Member to provide the vision to address national and global needs through synthetic biology and 2) his service to SynBYSS as the Founding Chair to provide a weekly, virtual, and multi-year forum where a global thought leader gives an opening 5 min talk, followed by a 45 min, rising star’s talk, for >1,000 global audiences.