Adam Arkin

Adam Arkin

Adam Arkin is the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He and his laboratory develop experimental and computational technologies for discovery, prediction, control and design of microbial and viral functions and behaviors in environmental contexts.

He is the chief scientist of the Department of Energy Scientific Focus Area, ENIGMA(Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies, http://enigma.lbl.gov), designed to understand, at a molecular level, the impact of microbial communities on their ecosystems with specific focus on terrestrial communities in contaminated watersheds. He also directs the Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) program: (http://kbase.us) an open platform for comparative functional genomics, systems and synthetic biology for microbes, plants and their communities, and for sharing results and methods with other scientists. He is director of the newly announced Center for Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space which seeks microbial and plant-based biological solutions for in situ resource utilization that reduce the launch mass and improves reliability and quality of food, pharmaceuticals, fuels and materials for astronauts on a mission to Mars. Finally, he is the Co-Director of the Berkeley Synthetic Biology Institute, which brings together U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Scientists with Industry Partners to forward technology and applications for sustainable biomanufacturing.

Keith Keller

Keith Keller

Keith Keller is a system administrator for KBase (https://kbase.us). He has been a member of the Arkin lab since 2002.

Marcin Joachimiak

Marcin P. Joachimiak

Marcin Joachimiak is a Staff Researcher and Software Developer in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He studied Mathematics at University of Chicago while creating transgenic yeast strains to enable high throughput herbicide screening for wheat. In 2002 he went West and studied Biophysics at UCSF where he implemented the Evolutionary Trace method and its variants (JEvTrace), identified novel targets and inhibitors for antimalarials, and performed the first genome annotation and contributed to the first gene expression analysis of the malaria parasite. After a year at Five Prime Therapeutics, where he founded the computational infrastructure and used the Riken mouse cDNA collection to discover novel human genes, he returned to academia as a postdoc in the Brenner Group at UC Berkeley. At UCB he developed a popular visualization tool (JColorGrid), performed key sequence and phylogeny analysis for the Global Ocean Survey, and published an affinity-based model for human branch point site prediction. Since 2006 he has been a member of the Arkin Laboratory, first as part of the ENIGMA project where he developed the gene expression analysis pipeline, functional genomics analysis tools in MicrobesOnline, and a novel machine learning algorithm for multi-data type biclustering. Since 2014 he has been part of the DOE KnowledgeBase where he designs and develops applications for statistical and visualization analysis and most recently on components of the system to enable rapid data type modeling, data science and machine learning, and integration with ontologies and knowledge graphs.

morgan rufus Morgan Price 1

Morgan Price

Thanks to cheap DNA sequencing, we are slowly starting to understand the incredible diversity of bacteria. Morgan Price builds computational tools to help us use all this data to understand how diverse bacteria work. This understanding can help us manage our environment, control the bacteria inside us, and develop new biotechnologies.

Kyle Sander

Kyle Sander

Kyle Sander earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.S. degree in Biological and Ecological Engineering studying life cycle effects of algae production for fuels and co-products. He also investigated rapid sand filtration as an algal dewatering process step and enzymatic degradation of, and simultaneous saccharification and ethanol production from of algal cell biomass. Kyle earned his PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville conducting his thesis research within the BioEnergy Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kyle characterized regulatory genes and related cellular redox in two candidate lignocellulolytic, ethanol-producing biocatalysts; Clostridium thermocellum and Caldicellulosiruptor bescii. Basic redox metabolism was characterized yielding an expanded view of redox metabolism in these organisms and effected bioprocessing improvements through genetically modifying redox-related regulation. A genotype-phenotype relationship was similarly identified between the FapR local fatty acid biosynthesis repressor and tolerance to elevated osmolarity conditions, a highly complex, bioprocess-limiting, and difficult-to-engineer trait in C. bescii. As a member of the CUBES project, Kyle studies unbalanced growth coupling of polyhydroyalkanoate production in species of Cupriavidus, and rhizosphere microbiome interspecies interactions toward improving reliability of probiotic species ingress in diverse community settings.

Lauren Lui

Lauren Lui

Lauren is interested in how we can use the latest sequencing technology to study environmental microbial communities, particularly nanopore sequencing.  She studied mathematical biology and bioinformatics at UC Davis, and received her PhD in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics from UC Santa Cruz. Ever since she started doing research, Lauren has sought to integrate quantitative and computational methods with experimental biology.  Currently, her projects include dissecting plant-microbe interactions with transposon mutant libraries, using synthetic microbial communities to understand the ecological and genetic factors of microbial interactions, and metagenomics of environmental microbes. Her ultimate goal is to be able to predict microbial interactions and community assembly from genome content and environmental measurements. In addition to her scientific work, Lauren is the co-secretary for the Women Scientists and Engineers Council at LBNL and loves doing photography, playing the ukulele, and illustrating with graphic arts.

Astrid Terry

Astrid Terry

Astrid Terry is the ENIGMA Project Manager. Her role is to monitor and enable progress of each project and investigator in the program and closely manage the budget. She coordinates and communicates updates, reports & publications to DOE. A major goal is identifying opportunities for collaboration, and increasing awareness of capabilities and resources available across the Science Focus Area.

Gwyneth Terry

Gwyneth Terry

Gwyneth Terry is a senior administrator supporting Adam Arkin and his laboratory at Berkeley Lab and University of California, Berkeley. She has a BSc in geology from Cal State East Bay. She assists lab personnel with the UCB and LBL bureaucracy and helps moves science forward.

Kelly Wetmore

Kelly Wetmore

Kelly Wetmore is a graduate student in Adam Arkin’s lab at UC Berkeley with over 15 years of experience in microbial physiology and genetics before and during graduate school. She has been instrumental in developing a number of next-generation tools and protocols for microbial functional genomics. Kelly is supporting the CUBES team in applying these tools to optimize the core biomanufacturing microbes in physiologically more-or-less relevant conditions. She is also part of a large DOE environmental systems biology project in which she is developing a new technology to query high-throughput genetic interactions.

Kelsey Hern

Kelsey Hern

Kelsey Hern completed her B.S. in Biochemistry in 2016 and went on to develop nanotechnologies to understand, diagnose and treat infectious respiratory diseases. She did her PhD work in Adam Arkin’s lab designing lower airway communities for protection against respiratory infection. As a Women in Enterprising Science Fellow at the Innovative Genomics Institute, Kelsey works to take the technology developed in her PhD and apply it to real-world clinical problems. Kelsey’s research interests include microbial interactions, synthetic biology and the development of living materials for improving health.