Advisor: Gözde Demirer Option: Biology My project focuses on engineering symbiotic interactions between plants and soil bacteria. The symbiotic bacteria provide essential nutrients to the plants, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.
Advisor: Lea Goentoro Option: Bioengineering I study how metabolic contributions from feeding Lactobacillus can promote regenerative responses to limb amputation in the poorly regenerating, adult Drosophila model.
Advisor: Mikhail Shapiro Option: Bioengineering My research aims to combine developments in biomaterial cell encapsulation techniques with the current synthetic biology boom to develop allogeneic cell therapies that can avoid recognition from the host immune system. Specifically, I am developing noninvasive diagnostic implants to detect inflammation, with the long term goal of applying this to other indications and potentially incorporating cells that can provide both a diagnostic marker and release a therapeutic agent all locally.
Advisor: Wei Gao Option: Medical and Electrical Engineering Research: Josh creates molecular dynamics simulation models of wearable biosensor systems to understand the factors that influence biosensor performance. These models allow him to characterize bioreceptor conformational dynamics, target-biomarker binding, and transducer interface behavior. He has also taken simulation trajectory data and dimensionally reduced these large datasets to extract the structure-function link between bioreceptor dynamics to biosensor performance.
