GenScript Double Helix Symposium 2019

Head of Protein Design

Chris received his PhD from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth where he studied the mechanisms of bacterial virulence. As a postdoctoral fellow with David Baker at the University of Washington, Chris pioneered new methods for computational de novo design of disulfide-rich mini-proteins and peptides. Currently, Chris is the Head of Protein Design at the Institute of Protein Innovation where his group combines de novo protein design and high-throughput laboratory automation to accelerate drug discovery.

Professor

George M. Church, PhD '84, is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, a founding member of the Wyss Institute, and director of PersonalGenomes.org, the world's only open-access information on human genomic, environmental, and trait data. Church is known for pioneering the fields of personal genomics and synthetic biology. He developed the first methods for the first genome sequence & dramatic cost reductions since then (down from $3 billion to $600), contributing to nearly all "next generation sequencing" methods and companies. His team invented CRISPR for human stem cell genome editing and other synthetic biology technologies and applications – including new ways to create organs for transplantation, gene therapies for aging reversal, and gene drives to eliminate Lyme Disease and Malaria. Church is director of IARPA & NIH BRAIN Projects and National Institutes of Health Center for Excellence in Genomic Science. He has coauthored 450 papers, 105 patents, and one book, "Regenesis". His honors include Franklin Bower Laureate for Achievement in Science, the Time 100, and election to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.

Associate Professor

Dr. Das strives to make the computer modeling of life as agile and engaging as the design of software. His lab at Stanford focuses on medically relevant RNA molecules, developing computational and high-throughput chemical tools for the rapid modeling and design of these molecules. Dr. Das trained in particle physics and cosmology at Harvard and Cambridge before switching to molecular biophysics during his Ph.D. at Stanford and postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. He is an associate professor in the departments of biochemistry and physics at Stanford, and leads the Eterna massive open laboratory, which couples a 250,000-player videogame to the lab's massively parallel experimental tools and deep learning, the first such platform in citizen science.

Assistant Professor

Shawn Douglas earned a B.S. in Computer Science at Yale in 2003, and then a Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard in 2009, working in the laboratories of William Shih and George Church. He stayed at Harvard as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and then started his own lab as an Assistant Professor at UCSF. He was named as one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" in 2012 and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award from Barack Obama in 2016.

CEO

Dr. Fero is a California based scientist and entrepreneur who is best known for his work on the fundamental physics of the Electroweak interaction at CERN, MIT and SLAC, systems biology research at Stanford, and synthetic biology at TeselaGen.

Computational Staff Scientist

Dr. Nathan Hillson received his Doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard Medical School. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. Nathan is currently the Head of the BioDesign Department at the Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also a Principal Investigator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Agile BioFoundry together with being the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at TeslaGen Biotechnologies Inc. Dr. Hillson has developed experimental wetware, software, and automated laboratory devices. He had recently created PIACE, a highly efficient chromosomal integration method to engineer metabolic pathways in bacteria. Nathan also worked to develop the patented j5 DNA Assembly Software to create scar-less plasmids by combining designed DNA oligos and cloning strategies such as SLIC and Gibson. Dr. Hillson aims to create these automated platforms to standardize microbial engineering, DNA construction, and sequence validation.

Assistant Professor

Dr. Possu Huang received his PhD from Caltech with the first demonstration of a computationally designed novel protein-protein interface. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington before starting his group at Stanford. His research focuses on advancing the understanding of proteins for the engineering of novel therapeutics and other protein-based nanotechnology. He has contributed to a large number of de novo designed proteins, most notably to the unlocking of the design principles behind the TIM barrel fold. His group uses computational modeling, structural biology and experimental library optimization to continue the expansion of protein-based molecular platforms, as well as creating new design tools with modern neural network architectures.

Sr Research Scientist

Lynn Rothschild is passionate about the origin and evolution of life on Earth r elsewhere, while at the same time pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. She wears several hats as a senior scientist NASA's Ames Research Center and Bio and Bio-Inspired Technologies, Research and Technology Lead for NASA Headquarters Space Technology Mission Directorate, as well as Adjunct Professor at Brown University (full cv available https://vivo.brown.edu/display/lr3). Her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. Rothschild has brought her imagination and creativity to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, articulating a vision for the future of synthetic biology as an enabling technology for NASA's missions, including human space exploration and astrobiology. Since 2011 she has served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, which has pioneered the use of synthetic biology to accomplish NASA's missions, particularly focusing on the human settlement of Mars, astrobiology and such innovative technologies as BioWires and making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and a bioballoon. Her lab is testing these plans in space on in the PowerCell synthetic biology secondary payload on a DLR satellite, EuCROPIS, launched in December 2018.

CEO

Sri is cofounder and CEO of Octant, a synthetic biology drug discovery startup that is building comprehensive maps of the interactions between chemicals and hundreds to thousands of human drug targets. He is on leave from UCLA, where he is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, where his lab has worked on gene synthesis and multiplexed assays to explore questions in protein biochemistry, human genetic variation, gene regulation, chemical biology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics. Sri previously worked at the Wyss Institute and Harvard with George Church, where he built numerous technologies in gene synthesis, DNA information storage, gene editing, and large-scale multiplexed assays. He helped build Gen9, a gene synthesis company, as a member of the SAB and was the first employee of Joule Unlimited, an engineered algal biofuel company. He is a Searle Scholar (2015), NIH New Innovator (2014), and received his ScD in Biological Engineering at MIT working with Drew Endy (2007) and BS in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley working with Adam Arkin (2001).

Associate Professor

Jin Billy Li, Ph.D., is Associate Professor with tenure at Stanford University Department of Genetics. He received his bachelor' degree at Tsinghua University in Beijing China and PhD degree in Genetics from Washington University in St. Louis. After his postdoctoral training with Professor George Church at Harvard Medical School, he started his laboratory at Stanford in 2010. In his own lab, he has focused on studying RNA editing mediated by ADAR enzymes. His laboratory has made major contributions to the identification and mapping of RNA editing as well the regulation of functions. His current work focuses on two fascinating aspects of ADAR. One is the major biological function that is to evade dsRNA sensing to suppress autoimmunity. The other is to harness the endogenous ADAR enzyme for transcriptome engineering that holds great potential for RNA-based therapeutics.

VP of Marketing

VP of R&D

Dr. Cedric Wu obtained a PhD degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from University of Wisconsin - Madison where he also received post-doc training in nucleic acid, surface and analytical chemistry. Dr. Wu possesses more than twenty years of combined experience working in academia, government and industry. He invented and published more than 20 articles and patents, as well as numerous trade secrets. Dr. Wu, currently, is leading the R&D team in GenScript focusing on on protein, antibody engineering, nucleic acid chemistry, genome editing, bioinformatics, data storage, semiconductor chip development and gene synthesis.