Breakthrough Discuss 2019 was held at UC Berkeley April 11-12, 2019. The theme, “Migration of Life in the Universe,” brought together an all-star group of astronomers, biologists, chemists and other experts to discuss whether and how primitive life can move between planets and stars, and if that is how life began on Earth.
Kate Adamala | Life, But Not Alive: Breakthrough Discuss 2019 .
Kate gave seminar at Foundations Of Nanoscience: Self-Assembled Architectures And Devices (Fnano19).
Kate, Aaron, Joe, Tanner, Judee and Wakana participated in 2019 Breakthrough Discuss meeting.
Contact: christot@umn.edu
Postdoc, expert in microfluidics.
Orion joined the Adamala lab in early 2019; since then, they have focused on the development of tools for synthetic cell engineering, rational RNA design, and using those synthetic biology techniques to elucidate viroid and plastid evolution. Orion joined the BMBB department as a PhD student in 2022.
Judee received her B.S. in Microbial Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. Although she did do research in her undergraduate years, she didn’t find her true interest in environmental microbiology and its applications until she began researching at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and start-up companies like Pivot Bio and Wild Earth. In 2018, she made the move to the University of Minnesota’s graduate program in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics where she joined the Adamala-Engelhart Lab. She is interested in furthering the functionality of synthetic cells for use in environmental biotechnology applications. Likewise, she would like to use synthetic cell mechanisms to consider (or reconsider) the origins of life on Earth or potentially in extraterrestrial systems. When she’s not in lab, she likes to read, watch The Office, backpack, and drink beer.
Contact: sharo112@umn.edu
Wakana received her B.S. in Agriculture at Hokkaido University, Japan in 2018. She began her research career as an undergraduate under Dr.Takasuka, studying biomass-degrading enzymes, and Dr. Kato, studying the discovery of bioactive natural compounds.
In 2018, Wakana started graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and joined Dr. Kate Adamala’s lab. She is interested in enzyme engineering for natural product synthesis and gene-based tool development for biocomputer.
Contact: sato0055@umn.edu
