Date of event: Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm PT

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Biography:

Karmella Haynes is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University. She earned her Ph.D. studying epigenetics and chromatin in Drosophila at Washington University, St. Louis. Postdoctoral fellowships at Davidson College and Harvard Medical School introduced her to synthetic biology. Her Davidson HHMI postdoc fellowship project on bacterial computers was recognized as “Publication of the Year” in 2008 by the Journal of Biological Engineering. Today, her research aims to apply the intrinsic properties of chromatin, the DNA-protein structure that packages eukaryotic genes, to engineer proteins and nucleic acids that control cell development. After Dr. Haynes joined the faculty at the Emory School of Medicine in 2019, she received an NIH R21 grant (2019) to develop new protein engineering and computational tools for cancer epigenetics, and launched the annual NSF-funded AfroBiotech conference series (2019). She is a founder and instructor of the Cold Spring Harbor Summer Course on Synthetic Biology (2013 – present), a member of the national Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC, 2014 – present), past advisor and current Judge Emeritus for the annual International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition (2007 – present), and a member of the NIH National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity (2021). She was named one of 1000 Inspiring Black Scientists by Cell Mentor (Cell Press 2020), was a featured guest on PBS NOVA (2020) and PRI’s Science Friday (2016), was profiled in Forbes magazine (2020), and received Color Magazine’s Women of Color: Innovator in STEM award (2021).