Appendix B

Biographical Sketches for Workshop Planning Committee and Participants

PLANNING COMMITTEE

David Shaw (Chair) is the provost and executive vice president at Mississippi State University. Previously, he served as the vice president for research and economic development, on the faculty in the College of Agriculture, and as a research center director focused on transdisciplinary research projects. Shaw is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Weed Science Society of America. In 2017, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program selected him for its prestigious U.S.-France International Education Administrators Program. He also is the General Secretary for the American Geophysical Union. He served on the executive committee for the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, which oversaw funding provided following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Shaw is a Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University, the highest honor given to its faculty. He holds a doctorate degree from Oklahoma State University. Shaw has served as the co-organizer for two symposia hosted by the National Academies on pesticide resistance management, and recently was a member of a National Academies’ committee that developed recommendations on future funding opportunities in community resilience.

Dennis E. Discher is the Robert D. Bent Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of a National Cancer Institute–funded Physical Sciences Oncology Center/Project at the University of Pennsylvania since 2014. He has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1996 in the departments of engineering and applied science, pharmacology, and physics. His laboratory generally takes soft matter biophysics and polymer approaches, including scaling theories, to basic and applied questions across molecular, cell, and tissue scales. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His awards include the Shu Chien Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society and the Bessel Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Discher earned his PhD in bioengineering and in membrane biophysics and splicing biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, respectively. He has served on several National Academies’ committees, including the German-American Frontiers of Engineering Organizing Committee and the Panel on Review of the Material Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Konstantinos T. Konstantinidis is the Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences (adjunct) at the Georgia Institute of Technology and program faculty for the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. The overarching goal of his research is to advance understanding of how microorganisms adapt to human-induced environmental perturbations and cause disease. He is also interested in the biotechnological applications of microbial diversity in the bioremediation of environmental pollutants and the

assessment of water quality. Another major objective of his research is to develop novel culture-independent approaches and associated bioinformatics tools to study microbial communities in situ. He has published 180 papers in these areas, 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences alone, and received several international distinctions and awards for his work, including the 2010 International Skerman Award from the World Federation for Culture Collections. Konstantinidis is an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology and is in the top 1% of the world’s highly cited scientists and engineers by Clarivate/Web of Science. He obtained his PhD from Michigan State University.

Jennifer Martiny is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, and the co-director of its Center for Microbiome Science. She is a founder and the current lead of the Microbiome Centers Consortium, a national network of more than 40 academic centers whose research crosscuts medical, environmental, agricultural, and engineered microbiomes. She is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, an effort to make microbiome data more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). Her own research aims to develop and test conceptual theory for microbial communities, with a particular focus on the response of soil microbiomes to global change. This work applies methods ranging from multi-omic to culturing approaches along with fieldwork and meta-analysis. Martiny is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received her PhD in biological sciences from Stanford University.

Margaret McFall-Ngai is the inaugural director of Biosphere Sciences and Engineering, a new division at the Carnegie Institution for Science of the California Institute of Technology. She previously held tenured positions at the University of Southern California, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include the role of beneficial bacteria in health, the study of nested ecosystems of animals and their microbial partners, the mechanisms underlying the establishment and maintenance of persistent animal–bacterial interactions, and the convergent evolution of the eyes and light organs of animals. McFall-Ngai served as the organizer of the National Microbiome Initiative with the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama White House from 2014 to 2016. She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2012, and the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002. She received her PhD in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983. She has served on several National Academies’ committees, including the Committee on a New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring That the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution and on the National Academies’ Forum on Microbial Threats.

Connie J. Mulligan¹ is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Genetics Institute at the University of Florida. Prior to joining the University of Florida, she was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In her research program, she takes a biocultural approach that utilizes molecular genetic data to investigate questions about human evolution and disease, particularly diseases that show racial health disparities. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation for 20 years. Her current projects focus on the

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¹ Served as moderator for the Microbiome Workshop.

molecular mechanisms, such as epigenetic variation and the microbiome, that mediate the impact of psychosocial stress on health.

Randy J. Nelson is the founding chair of the Department of Neuroscience at West Virginia University, where he holds the McQuain Chair for Neurological Research. He is also the director of the Center for Foundational Neuroscience Research and Research at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. Previously, he served on the faculty of The Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins University. He has published more than 450 scientific articles and nearly a dozen books on biological rhythms, behavioral neuroendocrinology, stress, and immune function. He is a fellow of several scientific associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Animal Behavior Society. He earned his PhD in psychology and PhD in endocrinology from University of California, Berkeley. Nelson has served on many federal grant panels, on several scientific journal editorial boards, and on the National Science Foundation (NSF) Alan T. Waterman Award Committee. He was a member of the National Academies’ Committee for Animal Welfare Guidelines for the National Institutes of Health. Nelson served on the NSF Biology Directorate Advisory Committee (2014-2018) when the Understanding the Rules of Life program was initiated.

Keegan Sawyer currently serves as the project manager of science of science communication, on contract, with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. In this role, she develops and manages programs to support science ambassadors—scientists and professional communicators who can effectively engage with key stakeholders and broader publics about basic, discovery-oriented research. She is also the lead coordinator for the Science Public Engagement Partnership, a public–private collaboration with The Kavli Foundation to ensure that public engagement with basic science is supported, sustainable, and effective. Prior to her current position, Sawyer was a senior program officer at the National Academies, where she led projects on public policy and on research questions about ecosystem health, the interplay of environmental conditions and human health, and public engagement in science. She is committed to fostering discussions about research infrastructure, collaborative environments, and public engagement in science to support a healthier people and planet. Sawyer holds a PhD in environmental sciences and engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Corey J. Wilson is a professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also serves as the director and lead investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Growing Convergence Research Program for Biomolecular Systems Engineering. Prior to his current appointment, he was an associate professor at Yale University in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Preceding his first faculty appointment he was a Gordon E. Moore Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Wilson’s research program seeks to engineer novel synthetic biological systems of bespoke function for high-impact applications. His laboratory leverages a unique blend of iterative protein engineering and genetic engineering to design novel synthetic biological systems. Current efforts are focused on the area of engineering cooperative systems of functional proteins and cognate genetic elements to create intelligent microorganisms, next-generation biological security and bio-cryptography tools, living therapeutics, and next-generation biosynthesis and biomanufacturing technologies. He was elected to the American Institute for

Medical and Biological Engineers (class of 2021) for his efforts in developing the field of biomolecular systems engineering. Wilson recently contributed to the National Academies’ workshop Strategies for Preventing, Countering, and Responding to Bioterrorism as a panelist and speaker in July 2022.

EPIGENETICS WORKSHOP

Moderators

Alexander Gimelbrant is currently an investigator at the Altius Institute. His research group focuses on developing computational and wet-lab tools to understand how similar cells and individuals can have different fates in development and disease, and how to nudge cells from disease to health. They focus on allele-specific analysis—a powerful approach to map genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that control activity of genes. Before joining the Altius Institute, Gimelbrant was an associate member at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, an associate professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. In his previous laboratory he investigated how the establishment of cell identity can be determined by the choice of which allele, maternal or paternal, will be expressed in a given cell lineage. The laboratory’s research has shown that this type of allelic choice occurs with many hundreds of human genes, creating an extraordinary epigenetic diversity in cell populations, such as those in the immune and nervous systems.

Connie J. Mulligan (see biography in Planning Committee section above).

Kunal Rai is an associate professor of genomic medicine at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He also serves as the scientific director of an epigenetics-focused translation research initiative at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, named the MDACC Epigenomics Therapy Initiative. Rai’s research is focused on understanding the contribution of the epigenome to cancer progression and identifying new venues for therapy and diagnostic tools. His laboratory utilizes cutting-edge epigenomic approaches to study chromatin state changes and higher order chromatin structure during the evolution of tumor cells. Over the past 20 years, Rai has developed expertise in studying epigenetic processes by identifying factors that perform epigenetic functions and identifying their roles in cellular events that regulate normal organ development and abnormal cell growth during tumorigenesis.

Participants

Lydia M. Contreras is a professor (and the Jim and Barbara Miller Faculty Fellow) of chemical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is also a member of the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology. She completed her PhD in chemical engineering at Cornell University in 2008, focusing on engineering bacterial cells for improved production of therapeutic proteins. As a postdoctoral associate at the Wadsworth Center (New York State Department of Health), she focused on understanding mechanisms of infection in pathogenic bacteria. She began her career at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011, where she leads a research team focused on RNA biochemistry to study gene regulation mechanisms associated

with stress responses for applications in health and biotechnology. Her research team is particularly interested in how environmental stressors influence the transcriptome.

Julie Hotopp is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she is also a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences. Hotopp has more than 20 years of experience in genomics and bioinformatics with a focus on host–microbe genomics and on bacteria–animal lateral gene transfer. This work includes two paradigm-shifting manuscripts on bacteria–animal lateral gene transfer. One of these described widespread lateral gene transfer from Wolbachia endosymbiont to their animal hosts. Her further work on bacteria–animal lateral gene transfer includes sequencing and analysis of numerous microbes, insects, nematode, mouse, and human genomes and transcriptomes as funded over the past decade through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Transformative R01, an NIH New Innovator Award, and other NIH, National Science Foundation, and private foundation awards. Her current research profile includes numerous projects pushing the boundaries of genome sequencing technologies to understand and interrogate host–microbe interactions.

Jeff Lozier is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama, where he has held a faculty position since 2011. Lozier received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, where he worked on the evolutionary genetics of aphids and their parasitoid wasps. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Sydney Cameron at the University of Illinois Department of Entomology from 2008 to 2011, where he began working on bumblebee conservation and genetics. Lozier’s laboratory focuses on the population genomics of invertebrates, with his main interest being bumblebee evolution, but other projects involve mussel biodiversity genomics and crayfish community ecology. He is especially interested in the mechanisms that allow widespread species to tolerate diverse stressful conditions encountered throughout their geographic ranges.

Hollie Putnam² is a tenured associate professor at the University of Rhode Island in the Department of Biological Sciences. She is an integrative biologist using cross-scale approaches to understand how corals and other marine invertebrates acclimatize and adapt to a changing environment through mechanisms such as parental effects, symbiosis, and (epi)genetics. She received her PhD in zoology from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2012 and completed subsequent positions as a National Science Foundation Ocean Sciences postdoctoral fellow and an assistant researcher at the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology, and as a research associate at the University of Washington. She has published more than 85 peer-reviewed papers and her work is supported by local, national, and international governmental agencies, as well as private foundations.

Kaushik Ragunathan is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Brandeis University. Ragunathan’s laboratory is interested in understanding how dynamic chromatin-dependent interactions produce stable, heritable, and adaptive epigenetic states. After completing his undergraduate degree in biotechnology in India, he joined the biophysics program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His graduate work was focused on using single molecule fluorescence microscopy to investigate DNA repair mechanisms. After obtaining his

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² Also participated in the Cross-Cutting Workshop.

PhD, he served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He was recruited as an assistant professor in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan and was also selected to be a part of the Biological Sciences Scholars program that supports promising young researchers early in their career at the University of Michigan. In addition to being deeply invested in mentoring and training graduate students, he also serves as a mentor for the National Institutes of Health K99 MOSAIC scholars program administered by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to enable underrepresented scholars to transition successfully to faculty positions.

Keith Slotkin³ has a joint position between the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the University of Missouri. His academic journey has taken him from Michigan (where he was raised) to the University of Arizona (undergraduate), the University of California, Berkeley (PhD), Cold Spring Harbor (postdoctoral fellowship), The Ohio State University (assistant and associate professor), and now to St. Louis. His laboratory has four main goals: (1) to investigate how transposable elements and transgenes are selected to undergo epigenetic silencing, (2) to produce next-generation technologies, (3) to work with industry to commercialize findings and technologies, and (4) to train the next generation of scientists. He is the lead principal investigator on a URoL:Epigenetics project that collaborates with six other laboratories, including mathematicians and computer scientists, to understand the lasting heritable effects of a higher CO₂ atmosphere on plant chromatin organization and growth.

MICROBIOME WORKSHOP

Moderators

Jo Handelsman is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Vilas Research Professor, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama as the associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she served for 3 years until January 2017, and was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Yale University before that. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in molecular biology and has since authored more than 200 scientific research publications, 30 editorials, and 29 essays. She is responsible for groundbreaking studies in microbial communication and metagenomics. She is also widely recognized for her contributions to science education and diversity in science. She has authored numerous articles about classroom methods and mentoring, and she is the co-author of six books about teaching, including Entering Mentoring and Scientific Teaching. She received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring from President Obama in 2011 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

Jennifer Martiny (see biography in Planning Committee section above).

Margaret McFall-Ngai (see biography in Planning Committee section above).

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³ Also participated in the Cross-Cutting Workshop.

Participants

Eric Allen is a professor of marine microbiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Molecular Biology in the School of Biological Sciences. Research in the Allen laboratory centers on the microbiota associated with diverse marine organisms, including fish, invertebrates, and seagrasses. Current projects, including an ongoing National Science Foundation Understanding the Rules of Life award, seek to develop robust cultivation systems to propagate marine host-associated microbiota under controlled laboratory conditions to explore the form and function of these specialized communities via integrated metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and metabolomic experiments. Efforts are also under way to develop the California sea hare, Aplysia californica, as a model organism to investigate microbiome dynamics in an experimentally tractable marine animal.

Jose Cerrato is an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at the University of New Mexico. His research interest is related to biogeochemical processes at the interface of water and energy that affect the cycle of metals and radionuclides in the environment. He leads the E-H₂O Research Group, which applies spectroscopy, microscopy, aqueous chemistry, and molecular biology tools for the study of complex environmental interactions. Cerrato was a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a recipient of the OAS-LASPAU-Fulbright Scholarship, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, the University of New Mexico Faculty of Color Research Award, and the NSF CAREER Award.

Rosalina Christova is the project director of the Primary Algae Laboratory at California State University San Marcos. The Primary Algae Laboratory is part of the Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program and is funded by the California Water Resources Control Board. She has pioneered the use of algae as bioindicators of stream water quality in California. Her published research includes 54 peer-reviewed articles—which describe more than 20 new-to-science freshwater and marine algal species—and discuss questions pertaining to species interactions with their aquatic environment, understanding algal responses to global human alterations and climate change. Her current research is centered on benthic toxin-producing cyanobacteria in flowing waters in California, an ongoing interdisciplinary effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Understanding the Rules of Life: Emergent Networks program. Christova has co-mentored five undergraduate NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates students and nearly 20 California State University San Marcos students with diverse backgrounds, leading to a peer-reviewed publication with several of them. She is teaching aquatic ecology courses at California State University San Marcos. Christova holds a PhD in botany/phycology from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski in Bulgaria and recently accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University.

Robert W. Thacker is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Thacker completed his BS (zoology) at Duke University. After completing his PhD (biology) at the University of Michigan, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guam and the University of Hawaii. Thacker was a faculty member at the University of Alabama at Birmingham from 2000 to 2015, then joined Stony Brook University in 2015. He teaches a variety of courses at Stony Brook, including ecology, statistics, and molecular diversity laboratory. His research program focuses on the evolutionary ecology of sponges and microbial symbionts.

Rebecca Vega Thurber is the Pernot Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at Oregon State University. Her laboratory investigates the role and dynamics of bacteria and viruses in marine hosts and habitats in order to better understand and mitigate or prevent the proximate causes of marine disease, habitat degradation, and ecosystem alteration. She is currently a senior editor of the flagship journal The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal. Vega Thurber is an author on more than 90 scientific publications, including 4 book chapters, and her collective work has been cited more than 19,000 times to date. Vega Thurber has been awarded more than $5.3 million in funding, and her laboratory has trained 11 postdoctoral researchers, 13 PhD students, and 29 undergraduates. Vega Thurber is committed to communicating science to broader audiences, including the production of a multilingual cartoon series and a full-length documentary on coral reef decline titled “Saving Atlantis.” She has spoken on Capitol Hill and has been a featured speaker at national and international meetings. Through these platforms, she seeks to influence the public discourse on marine conservation and its importance to biodiversity, local economies, and cultural preservation. Vega Thurber graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1999, with dual degrees in marine biology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. She received her PhD from Stanford University in biological sciences in 2005. She conducted her National Science Foundation minority postdoctoral fellowship at San Diego State University with Forest Rohwer from 2006 to 2009.

Jizhong Zhou⁴ is the George Lynn Cross Research Professor and the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma. His expertise is on microbial ecology and genomics in the fields of climate change, groundwater bioremediation, wastewater treatments, bioenergy, and theoretical ecology. He has published more than 700 papers and was recognized as a top 0.1% globally highly cited researcher by all three major complementary metrics based on Elsevier’s Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. He received the 2022 Soil Science Research Award, the 2022 ISME-IWA BioCluster Grand Prize Award, the 2019 American Society for Microbiology Award for Environmental Research, the U.S. Department of Energy Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 2014, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001. He is an editor-in-chief for mLife, a senior editor for the ISME Journal, an associate editor for Microbiome, a former senior editor for mBio, and a former editor for Applied and Environmental Microbiology. He is a fellow of the International Water Association, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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⁴ Also participated in the Cross-Cutting Workshop.

SYNTHETIC CELL WORKSHOP

Moderators

Kate Adamala is an assistant professor of genetics and cell biology and development at the University of Minnesota. A biochemist building synthetic cells, her research aims to improve understanding of the chemical principles of biology by using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. The interests of her laboratory span questions from the origin and earliest evolution of life, to using synthetic biology to colonize space, to the future of biotechnology and medicine. She received an MSc in chemistry from the University of Warsaw in Poland, studying synthetic organic chemistry. In graduate school, she worked with Pier Luigi Luisi from University Roma Tre and Jack Szostak from Harvard University. She studied RNA biophysics, small peptide catalysis, and liposome dynamics in an effort to build a chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Adamala’s postdoctoral work in Ed Boyden’s Synthetic Neurobiology group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on developing novel methods for multiplex control and readout of mammalian cells.

Eric Gaucher was hired as an associate professor by the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, where his group conducts basic and applied research at the interface of molecular evolution and synthetic biology. He was guided in biochemistry by Peter Tipton and in Bayesian Theory by George Smith. Gaucher subsequently earned his PhD from the University of Florida under the tutelage of Steve Benner and Michael Miyamoto. Gaucher received the Walter M. Fitch Award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution for his graduate work. He then did postdoctoral work with NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in conjunction with a National Research Council fellowship. After the 2-year fellowship, Gaucher served as the president of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. Gaucher is also the founder and president of the early-stage biotechnology company General Genomics, which exploits novel platforms to engineer proteins for the biomedical and industrial sectors.

Corey J. Wilson (see biography in Planning Committee section above).

Participants

Jef Boeke, the founding director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at New York University Langone Health, is known for foundational work on mechanistic and genomic aspects of retrotransposition. He is a pioneer of synthetic genome construction, as he synthesized the first artificial yeast chromosome de novo. He also leads an international consortium that built the highly engineered genome of the first synthetic eukaryote, Yeast 2.0. Using big DNA technology to build mammalian gene loci in yeast and then delivering those loci and their variants to stem cells, Boeke and his team are working to understand the “instruction manuals” that specify how human genes are expressed. This research has informed technology that enables the rapid design and development of humanized mouse models for studying the treatment of diseases. Boeke has founded several biotechnology companies, including Avigen Inc., CDI Labs, and Neochromosome, Inc. Most recently, his laboratory developed a highly automated RT-PCR workflow and software infrastructure that was central to a COVID-19 testing pipeline deployed by another company he helped found, the Pandemic Response Lab.

Mary Elting has been an associate professor of physics at North Carolina State University since 2017. Her interest in biophysics was first sparked as an undergraduate in the Weninger Laboratory in the North Carolina State University Department of Physics. She went on to complete her PhD in applied physics at Stanford University in 2006, where she modularly engineered myosin molecular motors to explain how molecular structure supports mechanical force generation. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, she next probed how biological macromolecules self-organize to generate force at the cellular, rather than molecular, length-scale in the mitotic spindle. She is also a member of the Quantitative and Computational Developmental Biology cluster at North Carolina State University through the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program. In collaboration with others in that cluster, she plans to apply her approaches to understanding how biological force scales not only from the molecular to the cellular level but also between cells and across tissues.

Farren Isaacs is a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and biomedical engineering at Yale University. Isaacs has pioneered technologies for genome and RNA engineering for the construction of organisms with recoded genomes and the production of novel chemicals, proteins, and materials to solve problems in biotechnology, materials science, environmental health, and medicine. Isaacs has been recognized with various awards, including a Beckman Young Investigator award by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation and a Young Professor award from DuPont, Inc. Innovations from his laboratory have led to the formation of biotechnology companies including enEvolv (acquired by Zymergen), 64x Bio, Peter Bio, and Pearl Bio. Isaacs received his BSE in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, received his PhD in biomedical engineering-bioinformatics at Boston University, and conducted postdoctoral training in genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Christopher Kempes is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Broadly, Kempes is interested in finding theories and principles that apply to a wide range of biological scales and hierarchies. He generally focuses his work on biological architecture—which may include phenomena ranging from explicit biological morphology to metabolic and genetic network structure—as an intermediate between organism physiology and environmental conditions. Mathematical and physical theories lie at the heart of his methodologies to predict how evolution has shaped architecture and how this, in turn, forms a foundation for reliable predictions of environmental response and interaction. His work spans the scales of genetic information architecture to the morphology of microbial individuals and communities to the regional variation of plant traits and their feedback with climate and available resources.

Allen Liu is an associate professor in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and biophysics at the University of Michigan. He received a BSc in biochemistry (Honors) from the University of British Columbia in 2001, obtained his PhD in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, received his postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, and then started his research group in 2012 at the University of Michigan. His current research interests lie in cellular mechanotransduction, and he uses tools from quantitative cell biology, synthetic biology, biophysics, and microfluidics. He is a recipient of the National Institutes of Health’s Director’s New Innovator Award, a Young Innovator by Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, a Rising Star from CMBE-BMES, and Future of Biophysics Burroughs Wellcome Fund Symposium speaker. He is a recipient of the Endeavour Executive

Fellowship (Australia) and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researcher (Germany).

Vincent Noireaux is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He received his BSc in applied physics at the University of Tours (France) in 1994. In 1995 he moved to Paris for physics graduate school at the University Paris 11 (Orsay). He did his PhD at the Curie Institute (Paris, 1996-2000) in biological physics in the laboratory of Jacques Prost on the motion of the bacterium Listeria. He studied the actin cytoskeleton mechanisms involved in cell motility and learned the biology related to this project in the laboratory of Daniel Louvard. In 2000 he joined the laboratory of Albert Libchaber at The Rockefeller University in New York City where he spent 5 years as a postdoctoral researcher. He used cell-free expression systems to construct elementary gene networks and synthetic cell systems. In 2005, he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he is pursuing his work in synthetic biology using cell-free expression. His research consists of constructing and characterizing biochemical systems by executing synthetic DNA programs in vitro, from simple regulatory elements to synthetic cells.

Sindy K. Y. Tang is the Kenneth and Barbara Oshman Faculty Scholar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and, by courtesy, of radiology (Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics) at Stanford University. She received her PhD from Harvard University in engineering sciences under the supervision of George Whitesides. The micro-nano-bio laboratory under Tang’s direction aims to develop innovative micro- and nanoscale devices that enable precise manipulation, measurement, and recapitulation of biological systems in order to understand the “rules of life” and accelerate precision medicine and material design for a future with better health and environmental sustainability. Tang was a Stanford Biodesign Faculty Fellow in 2018, and her work has been recognized by multiple awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an invited lecture at the Nobel Symposium on Microfluidics in Sweden.

CROSS-CUTTING WORKSHOP

Moderators

Stephen M. Fiore is the director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory and a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Cognitive Sciences Program in the Department of Philosophy and School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training. He maintains a multidisciplinary research interest that incorporates aspects of the cognitive, social, organizational, and computational sciences in the investigation of learning and performance in individuals and teams. His primary area of research is the interdisciplinary study of complex collaborative cognition and the understanding of how humans interact socially and with technology. He is the immediate past president of the International Network for the Science of Team Science and the past president of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research.

Jeanne Garbarino is the executive director for RockEDU Science Outreach at The Rockefeller University, where she works along with the RockEDU team to help open channels for everyone—scientists and nonscientists alike—to develop an appreciation for science as a human

endeavor that is steeped in personal connections and perspectives, and to provide equitable access to scientific resources and opportunities that genuinely reflect the process of science. She is deeply interested in how we can strengthen the practice and culture of mentorship in science. Before becoming a practitioner of science engagement, Garbarino kicked off her scientific career as a lipid biochemist, earning her PhD in metabolic biology from Columbia University, then conducting postdoctoral studies on cholesterol transport at The Rockefeller University.

Participants

Leonora Bittleston is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Boise State University. Her research focuses on microbial community ecology, particularly the relationships among bacteria, fungi, and plants. Before joining Boise State, Bittleston was a James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in Complex Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and her BS in molecular environmental biology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her team uses observation, experimentation, functional assays, and metagenomic approaches to better understand the processes influencing Earth’s biodiversity. A current goal of Bittleston’s research is to uncover the principles of microbiome assembly and coexistence that enable the persistence of complex, species-rich microbial communities, and to decipher how the functions of these communities impact their ecosystems.

James Carothers is the Dan Evans Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research and Infrastructure in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington. He is also the co-director of the University of Washington Center for Synthetic Biology and a member of the university’s Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute. The Carothers research group combines computational modeling, CRISPR technology development, and RNA aptamer biosensor engineering for applications in synthetic biology. The group’s main goals are to understand biological design principles and to engineer biology to produce industrially and medically important chemicals and materials. Since arriving at the University of Washington in 2012, Carothers has been the lead principal investigator of more than $22 million in funded research. Recent work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and private industry. Carothers is a founding member of the scientific advisory board of Wayfinder Biosciences, a seed-funded biotechnology startup.

Tina Eliassi-Rad is a professor of computer science at Northeastern University, a core faculty member at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and the Institute for Experiential AI, and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Center. She earned her PhD in computer sciences (with a minor in mathematical statistics) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research is at the intersection of data mining, machine learning, and network science. Eliassi-Rad’s work has been applied to personalized search on the World Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, cyber situational awareness, drug discovery, democracy and online discourse, and ethics in machine learning. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by governments and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics), as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project).

Zachary Freedman is an assistant professor and the ON Allen Professor of Soil Microbiology in the Department of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Motivated by the need to better understand the massive impact of Earth’s smallest organisms, Freedman’s research group explores the ecological consequences of environmental change, including climate change, agricultural land management, and natural environmental gradients through the lens of microbial ecology and carbon and nitrogen biogeochemistry. Examples of ongoing research in the Freedman laboratory include investigations to better understand how the forest soil carbon sink will respond to reduced rates of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition, how cropping system decisions affect the production and stabilization of soil carbon, and whether generalizable rules of life govern the succession of microbial communities across systems.

Emma Frow is an associate professor at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment with the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Biological & Health Systems Engineering. Her research focuses on the governance of emerging biotechnologies, with a particular focus on synthetic biology. She studies governance from multiple perspectives, including, for example, conducting ethnographic research that traces decision-making practices at the micro-scale (governance through technology design) and designing collaborations and experimental engagements with scientists and engineers (interdisciplinary collaboration as a form of governance). Frow has received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding through the Understanding the Rules of Life program and is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award.

Ramesh Goel is an environmental engineering and microbiology professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Utah. Goel obtained his PhD from the University of South Carolina in 2003. Goel’s research addresses various issues related to water quality, nutrients in municipal wastewater, virology, and surface water quality. He integrates process engineering and computer bioinformatics to understand complex microbial networks in engineered bioreactors and natural ecosystems. His research has appeared in many journals of international repute, including Nature Communications, Water Research, Environmental Science & Technology, Bioresource Technology, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Waters, Environmental Pollution, and Chemosphere. The U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and water quality boards fund Goel’s research.

Sandra Loesgen has been an associate professor of chemistry at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and part of the Chemistry Department at the University of Florida since 2019. She graduated summa cum laude with a PhD in organic chemistry and pharmacology from Georg-August Universität Göttingen in Germany in 2007. She was a German Research Foundation–supported postdoctoral fellow in Bill Fenical’s laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and her postdoctoral research continued in the laboratory of Carole Bewley at the National Institutes of Health. From 2013 to 2019, she was an assistant professor at Oregon State University.

Lucas Miller is a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Lydia Contreras at The University of Texas at Austin. Lucas graduated summa cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2019 with a BS in chemical engineering. He became interested in understanding protein function as an

undergraduate, and he has further explored how proteins interact with chemically modified RNA species throughout his PhD program. Miller leads research with a collaborative team to characterize interactions of RNA binding proteins with modified RNA both in vitro and in silico to determine the fundamental rules behind protein recognition of modified RNA species. Miller has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program for his work in this area and has presented his findings in the context of oxidative stress at multiple conferences.

Hollie Putnam (see biography in Epigenetics section above).

Keith Slotkin (see biography in Epigenetics section above).

James P. Strange is currently the chair and a professor in the Department of Entomology at The Ohio State University. He joined The Ohio State University in 2019 after working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) for 13 years as a research entomologist. Strange began his career working as a USDA technician working on alfalfa breeding and seed production at the Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser, Washington. He attended graduate school and studied honeybee health and genetics at Washington State University. He spent 1 year as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University before returning to USDA-ARS at the Pollinating Insect Biology, Management, Systematics Research Unit in Logan, Utah. There he began working on bumblebees, focusing on their conservation, parasites, and population genetics. His laboratory currently focuses on bumblebee health related to landscape, including how bumblebees respond to parasites in different landscapes and how landscape impacts gene flow among populations.

Erika Szymanski is an assistant professor of rhetoric of science in the Department of English and a core member of the microbiome cluster at Colorado State University. Her research concerns words as scientific tools and multispecies questions raised by contemporary genetic and genomic biotechnologies. She also studies and teaches relationship-focused approaches to science writing. Before joining Colorado State University, Szymanski served as a postdoctoral researcher in science and technology studies at the University of Edinburgh, following a PhD in science communication, an MA in rhetoric and writing studies, and an MS in microbiology. She writes for diverse scientific, social scientific, humanities, and popular audiences, including a popular wine science book (but also informed by feminist and multispecies science studies) that was released in April 2023. Szymanski currently leads a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER project called microbiomish about how metaphors shape experimental approaches in microbiome science and possibilities for microbe–human coworking. She is the U.S. principal investigator on a collaborative UK Research and Innovation–NSF project called Future Organisms—about responsible research and innovation, synthetic genomics, and reimagining what responsible research means in more-than-human terms—and a co-investigator on an NSF Understanding the Rules of Life project, “Rules of Life with an RNA Genome.”

Miaoyan Wang is an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is also a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Foundations of Data Science (a multiUniversity TRIPODS Phase II Initiative) and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she was a joint postdoctoral researcher in

computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago and a BS in mathematics from Fudan University. Wang’s research is in machine learning theory, nonparametric statistics, and higher-order tensors.

Jizhong Zhou (see biography in Microbiome section above).