Biography

At Cambridge, I will develop water pollutant sensors. My pursuit to secure safe global water supplies began while working on the reconstruction of a failing wastewater treatment system in Honduras. I then travelled to Beijing to create a new material that sustainably purifies water when illuminated. Meanwhile, researching biological engineering at UC Berkeley and the University of Missouri gave me an appreciation for the mechanisms that sustained living systems for billions of years at a level of complexity unparalleled by human innovation. The emerging field of synthetic biology harnesses these mechanisms to design new biological systems for useful purposes. I believe synthetic biology is a promising approach to create water pollutant detection technology. At Cambridge I will use synthetic biology to help engineer a microorganism that changes color in the presence of unsafe mercury or arsenic levels, offering afflicted populations a route to identify safe water supplies.