Experience

Neelyx Labs
• United States
• Hospitals and Health Care
• 1 - 100 Employee
• Senior Scientist

  • Feb 2021 - Present


Caltech

• United States
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Graduate Student

  • 2015 - 2021

  When bacteria talk to one other, they usually speak in chemicals. This presents a challenge for communication: chemical messages travel very slowly and diminish over long distances. In nature, cells overcome this obstacle using highly sophisticated strategies like chemotaxis, quorum sensing, or ionic signaling. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to engineer any of these solutions in synthetic organisms, to say nothing of combining one with a cell-cell communication circuit. In my thesis work, I design and demonstrate a long-distance signaling circuit that operates over long distances (several millimeters) and is compatible with strategies commonly employed in synthetic biology. I first show experimentally that faster-than-diffusion communication is possible by repurposing the signaling components of quorum sensing, a method of cell-cell communication used by many species of bacteria. I then show that this approach to communication can improve the sensitivity of growing colonies to signals initiated by minority components. Finally, I developed and parameterized a mathematical model of this communication circuit and show in simulation how it can be used to support complex operations in engineered microbial consortia.

• Graduate Student

  • 2015 - 2018

  I joined an ongoing project led by Niranjan Srinivas that culminated in the first all-DNA chemical oscillator. This device was unique in that it lacked any enzymes; it was powered solely by the exchange of hydrogen bonds in DNA strand displacement reactions. The solution to this challenge was to combine a range of thermodynamic and engineering tricks to arrive at a well-balanced set of strand displacement reaction dynamics. My contribution to this project was a Python program that takes in a specification of a simple chemical reaction network and generates sequences for DNA molecules that can mimic that input network's dynamics. I then used this program to design the second all-DNA oscillator to show that our approach reliably produces good DNA kinetics, and it worked on the first try!