ABSTRACT
Christina Smolke is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She graduated with a BS in chemical engineering with a minor in biology from the University of Southern California in 1997. She conducted her graduate training as a National Science Foundation Fellow in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley and earned her PhD in 2001. Christina conducted her postdoctoral training as a National Institutes of Health Fellow in cell biology at UC Berkeley. She started her independent research program as an assistant professor in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology from 20032008. She has pioneered a research program in developing foundational technologies for the design and construction of engineered ligand-responsive RNA-based regulatory molecules, their integration into molecular computation and signal integration strategies, and their reliable implementation into diverse cellular engineering applications. ese technologies are resulting in scaleable platforms for the construction of molecular tools that work across many cellular systems and allow regulation of targeted gene expression levels in response to diverse endogenous or exogenous molecular ligands. Her research is rapidly advancing current capabilities of noninvasive detection of cellular state and programming cellular function. In particular, her laboratory is examining the application of these tools to the optimization of metabolic pathway engineering strategies in organisms such as yeast.
