Erika Alden DeBenedictis
I’m a computational physicist and molecular biologist. I’m interested in solving big problems using evolution. Today I’m a serial founder supported by The Astera Institute’s Residency program.
I received a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT in 2021 and a BS in Computer Science from Caltech in 2014. I did a postdoc in David Baker’s Lab, where I worked on machine learning for protein design, and ran an academic lab for at the Francis Crick Institute in London. I’ve also worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Sandia National Laboratories, Dropbox, and D. E. Shaw Research.
Top of the mind: A podcast I was on about the future biotech-fueled space travel, and an interview where I talk about the origins of life.
Check out a rundown of my past projects.
Most recently
Pioneer Labs
I am the CEO of Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit startup engineering microbes for Mars.
The Align Foundation
I founded The Align Foundation, a nonprofit on a mission to improve life science research through programmable experiments. Our first program was the Bioautomation Challenge, a grant program that offers academics access to fully-programmable cloud labs.