About
CarbonDrop - Director of Scientific Research
CarbonDrop, founded by a combination of Silicon Valley veterans and genetic engineers, is the most ambitious carbon sequestration company conceived to date, and our aim is to put a serious dent in the climate problems afflicting the planet.
The company’s goal is to sequester tens of gigatonnes of CO2 per year, and thus turn the clock back on global warming. Moreover, given the scalability of the biological innovations we intend to develop, we believe we can accomplish this at a cost per tonne that is radically lower than the achievable targets of the other known carbon dioxide removal companies operating today.
In summary, our goal is to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere each year than is currently being emitted, and to do this at a cost per tonne of less than $5.00, which is more than an order of magnitude lower than competing proposals.
Postdoc (joint appointment)
University of California, Berkeley - Niyogi lab - Plant and Microbial Biology Department
University of California, San Francisco - Marshall lab - Center for Cellular Construction
As a joint postdoc between the Marshall (UCSF) and Niyogi (UCB) labs, I was interested in photosynthetic efficiency in the context of algal endosymbiosis. I used bioenergetic, molecular and light microscopy approaches to address how hosts regulate their algal symbionts, how this regulation affects algal metabolism and how algal endosymbionts in turn regulate their hosts. This work was inspired by observations of the symbiotic relationship in the wild ciliate Stentor pyriformis in the context of the Physiology course hosted by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.
Grad school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Maddox lab - Biology Department
As a graduate student in the Maddox lab at UNC Chapel Hill, I addressed how a nucleus comes to be a functional organelle within the cell. This is an essential process as every cell must form a new nucleus following cell division and condensed sperm chromatin must expand into a functional pronucleus following fertilization across organisms. We used a combination of mathematical modelling, several model organisms (mammalian cells, fly embryos, worm embryos, frog egg extracts) and quantitative live-cell microscopy approaches (tracking, morphological analyses, fluorescence intensity quantifications, etc) to determine the molecular requirements of nuclear expansion and assembly.
Undergrad
Université de Montréal - Archambault lab - Institute for Research in Cancer and Immunology