I’ve always been drawn to the edges. The places where disciplines blur and breakthroughs lurk just beneath the surface waiting for the right minds (artificial or living) to connect the dots. 

This naturally led me to synthetic biology, the most interdisciplinary playground I could find. 

My journey began as a University of Waterloo iGEM team member, then Project Director. It was here that I first experienced the power of democratizing biology. We ventured to make CRISPR —> “CRISP-IER”, then used stop codon read through to deepen our understanding S. cerevisiae prion mechanisms, going from Pri-OFF to Pri-ON, and generally strived to use as many puns as possible.

My curiosity carried me into entrepreneurship where I co-founded a cryopreservation longevity startup, and stopped incubating bacteria to become incubated myself. 

But synbio called again, and I was invited to pursue a PhD. There I specialized in areas I saw as critical bottlenecks and opportunities: high-throughput microbial engineering, accelerated antibiotic drug discovery for neglected pathogens like tuberculosis, and the development of open-source wetware and hardware platforms. 

My commitment to democratization has only deepened since. This is because I recognise that while biotech is affecting everyone, people are already affecting it back. They're using LLMs to design mRNA vaccines for their dogs and spearhead research for cures to their child's rare disease. A real space of agency is opening up faster than we can even understand.

And so I keep creating. I recently built a DNA synthesis safety screening tool, a bio-lab in a ceramics studio to sequence the local flora and fauna, made a short film, recorded songs for bacteria, and over the past year have been translating complex science, and documenting my ongoing thinking and research through my blog Life, Edited.

Today I’m thinking about the temporal realities of snails and the importance of operationalizing scientific intuition. I ultimately hope to one day launch my synbio serendipity lab where we just vibe until we accidentally unlock a key scientific discovery.