Mao Taketani is a postdoctoral researcher mentored by Christopher Voigt in the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT. She has been fascinated by the biology of microbe-to-host interactions, especially in the context of symbiosis in the human gastrointestinal tract. Now as a postdoc, she is interested in creating synthetic, microbe-to-host interactions by genetically engineering symbiotic bacteria to sense, compute and respond, with the eventual goal of controlling human health through engineered symbiotic bacteria.