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, … Read More

Zhenghan Qi is a cognitive neuroscientist dedicated to understand the mechanisms of language dysfunction in various neurodevelopmental disorders and to apply her research to the development of therapeutic intervention. After receiving her MD from Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, Zhenghan pursued her PhD in Neuroscience from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, focusing on the cognitive neuroscience of typical language learning. … Read More

Wen Jie Ong is a fourth year PhD candidate in organic chemistry at MIT under the supervision of Professor Timothy Swager. His research focuses on the development of new synthetic methodology and the design and synthesis of novel organic materials for heavy metals sensing and removal in water. Before coming to MIT, he spent a year at the Institute of … Read More

Miyabe, C.Y. is a PhD candidate in Drug Discovery under the mentorship of Dr. Alexandros Makriyannis at Northeastern University. She began researching enzymes as pharmaceutical targets at the University of California, Davis and expanded this focus in her thesis work for her PhD. Miyabe aims to develop a new method for designing active prodrugs that bind to more than one … Read More

Hiruy Meharena received his PhD in biomedical sciences from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. His research in graduate school focused on understanding the intramolecular regulation of Eukaryotic Protein Kinases under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Taylor. His research utilized biochemical, biophysical, structural and computational approaches to decipher the mechanics governing the inactive state as well as the … Read More

Jordan Lewandowski is a developmental biologist who is interested in understanding how regions of the genome that are devoid of protein-coding genes can contribute to human development and disease. The goal of his research is to better understand how our non-coding genome contributes to the etiology of human disease and to provide opportunities for better therapies and/or disease prevention. He … Read More

Sylvia Guillory is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston and is currently working with Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy in the Developmental and Brain Sciences program. Her research has focused on understanding information processing that occurs in working memory, the role that selective attention plays in this process during infancy and childhood, and how these interactions affect the quantity … Read More

Tyler Gibson is a postdoctoral fellow working in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. His current research focuses on studying the genetic and epigenetic cues that drive the development of sensory hair cells in the inner ear and whether these cues could be harnessed to coax the inner ear in adults to generate new hair cells. To that … Read More

Shiran Ferber received her Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology from the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University in 2015. Her research focused on developing polymer therapeutics and theranostic probes for cancer diagnosis and treatment. She is currently a postdoctoral associate at the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. … Read More

Ahmed Fazly received his PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN in 2011. He then completed his initial postdoctoral training at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, where his work resulted in the discovery of several promising antifungal drug candidates. After a hiatus from research, teaching high school chemistry and biology at a … Read More