About Me
As an undergraduate, I combined a degree in Chemistry with quantitative systems biology courses and research as part of Princeton’s Integrated Science program. I worked with several research groups, where I studied various aspects of transcriptomic (Genetics 2013) and metabolomic (Mol Cell 2012) regulation networks, primarily in yeast. I wrote my thesis with Prof. Josh Rabinowitz on fast vs. slow metabolomic responses of yeast to acute starvation.
I also began working in synthetic biology at Princeton in the lab of Prof. Ron Weiss, whose group published one of the first examples of engineering multicellular patterns. I spent one summer at Harvard with Prof. Kobi Benenson engineering RNAi feed-forward networks that stabilize expression against variations in genetic copy number (MSB 2011).
For my doctoral work, I joined the lab of Prof. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse. I managed to convince him to take a shot at combining a synthetic biology approach with his experience in studying emergent multicellular behaviors. I built the first fully genetic synthetic adhesion system, which enabled single cell-scale patterning in Escherichia coli (Cell 2018). In follow-up work, we demonstrated cm-scale patterns that implied only minimal information needed to generate arbitrary patterning of population interfaces (cover of Nature 2022).
I also continued more theoretical systems biology work in my PhD. I used mathematical modeling to show that signaling delays can prevent errors in lateral inhibition patterning, which are naturally much more ordered than basic models predict (PRL 2016). I developed this work into a full theory of delayed-signaling network motifs, which serves as a convenient reference for understanding phenomenological behavior of biological networks (Nat Comm 2021).
For my postdoctoral work, I joined Prof. Uri Alon’s group at the Weizmann Institute. I was interested in probing the relationship of synthetic circuits to whole-cell bacterial physiology and evolutionary pressures, and what one can learn from synthetic multicellular systems about comparable mammalian tissues. I focused on cellular differentiation, a crucial multicellular trait inherently susceptible to takeover by non-differentiating mutant stem cells. I overcame this fundamental challenge by engineering a cost to not differentiating, resulting in evolutionarily stable stem-cell lineages in E. coli (Cell 2024).
On the physiology front, I explored bacterial responses to antibiotic killing. I developed a mathematical “death law” that quantitatively predicts behavior of a novel, stress-driven antibiotic tolerance mechanism (PNAS 2023). I also contributed to work that discovered scaling laws (iScience 2024) and core regulatory network motifs (bioRxiv 2024) in human endocrinology.
My current focus is on identifying the critical ingredients required for multicellularity using a build-to-understand approach (Curr Op Gen & Dev 2020, Science news & views 2018). Guided by mathematical models, I engineer multicellular behaviors one-by-one into otherwise single-celled, planktonic E. coli. This effectively decouples multicellular mechanisms like cell-cell adhesion, cell-cell signaling, and differentiation, making it easier to spot fundamental principles in controlled experiments.
This engineering vision for multicellularity also generates synthetic platforms for engineered consortia, living materials, and artificial tissues. These all require precise control and evolutionary stability of multicellular groups, which remains a major engineering challenge. The synthetic E. coli systems I develop tackle these challenges, serve as platforms for complex multicellular engineering, and suggest multicellular principles to help guide future designs.
Education & Postdoctoral work
2018 - 2024
Weizmann Institute of Science
Postdoctoral research
Systems & synthetic biology research with Prof. Uri Alon
2011 - 2017
Stanford University
M.S. & Ph.D. in Bioengineering
2007 - 2011
Princeton University
A.B. in Chemistry, magna cum laude
Certificates: Quantitative & Computational Biology, Engineering Biology
Thesis with Prof. Joshua Rabinowitz: “Intrinsic and phosphorylation-based regulations of metabolic starvation response in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”
Teaching
University courses (TA):
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Stanford BioE42 (Spring 2012): “Physical Biology of cells”
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Stanford BioE311 (Winter 2013): “Biophysics of multicellular systems and amorphous computing”
Outreach:
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ORT Arab School for Science and Engineering (Lod, Israel): bimonthly 11th grade enrichment biology
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Stanford Splash lectures for high school students: "Genes, genetic engineering and synthetic biology"
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49ers Academy (East Palo Alto, CA): science labs for middle school
Mentoring:
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12+ undergraduate, rotation, MS, and PhD students at Stanford and Weizmann
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