Meet our team

I have a broad scientific background including a degree in physics from Williams College, a PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University, and a postdoc in bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. The through-line connecting these in my research is a quantitative approach to understanding the world, answering questions, and solving problems. My PhD thesis combined experiments and modeling to help explain how amoebas maintain directional persistence. My postdoctoral work similarly applied experiments and dynamic modeling to understand horizontal gene transfer in microbial communities.

My current focus builds on this to engineer living, bacterial biosensors for DNA. My goals are to improve these whole-cell DNA biosensors as noninvasive diagnostics for colorectal cancer, to convert them into affordable, DNA-based biosensors for medical or environmental samples, and to adapt them to not only detect pre-specified sequences, but record a snapshot of all extracellular DNA. Bacteria hold great potential for biosensing DNA, and the field has only begun to be explored. Of particular interest is our paper in Science developing biosensors to detect colorectal tumor DNA in the mammalian gut, and a forthcoming paper in Nature Reviews Bioengineering covering the invention and prospects of this field.