Sarah Richardson Microbyre

Dr. Sarah Richardson hails from west Baltimore. She earned a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland in 2004 and a Ph.D. in human genetics and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2011. She specializes in the design of genomes: as a DOE Computational Graduate Fellow she designed a synthetic yeast genome; as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow of Genomics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she worked on massive scale synthetic biology projects and the integration of computational genomics with experimental genomics; and as Chief Scientific Officer of Microbyre she leads the construction of genomic toolkits for non-model prokaryotes. All of which is to say that she uses DNA to teach bacteria to do tricks on command. Trained in both computational and molecular biology, she has a very unique perspective on the emerging technologies made possible by “synthetic” biology.