PORTFOLIO
Pioneer Labs
In 2024, Erika founded Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit startup engineering microbes for Mars. We work with hardy critters that can grow robustly even in extreme conditions. Pioneer aims to make biomanufacturing ubiquitous, reliable, and green — on Earth and beyond.
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Grow Everything Podcast
This podcast featured me in a discussion of evolution, automation, and space science.
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New Space Documentry
Pioneer was featured in Story Co’s first documentary, New space.
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"Let's go do that"
An interview on the origins of life, the feeling of doing science, and the possibility of terraforming Mars.
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Why nothing can grow on Mars*
*probably. An essay on the challenge and organism would face outside on the red planet.
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Polyextremophile engineering review
A review summarizing the basic mechanisms of extreme adaptations and synthetic biology’s efforts to engineer extremophile organisms beyond what is fund in nature.
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2024 Mars Terraforming Workshop
Proceedings of a two-day workshop on terraforming Mars.
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ALIGN TO INNOVATE
In 2022, Erika founded Align to Innovate, a nonprofit improving the reproducibility, scalability, and shareability of life science research with programmable experiments. Align hosts programs at the intersection of biology and automation, including the 2022 Bioautomation Challenge, and the Open Datasets Initiative.
Academic lab
Erika ran the Biodesign Lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London starting in late 2022.
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molpigs podcast
A podcast where I talk about starting a lab.
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JoVE article on PRANCE
A Journal of Visual Experiments article on how to set up Phage and Robotics Assisted Near Continuous Evolution.
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SubtiToolKit
A toolkit for multi-part Golden Gate assembly in B subtilis.
MACHINE LEARNING FOR PROTEIN ENGINEERING
In 2021, Erika did a postdoc in David Baker’s Lab, where she worked on machine learning for protein design.
MACHINE LEARNING FOR PROTEIN ENGINEERING
In 2021, Erika did a postdoc in David Baker’s Lab, where she worked on machine learning for protein design.
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Randomized gates eliminate bias in sort-seq assays, protein science
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Systematic Molecular Evolution using Prance, ML Protein Engineering Seminar Series
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DMS in Protein Design, Deep Mutational Scanning Symposium 2021
genetic code expansion
Erika received a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT in 2021, where she studied the origins of life and the possibility of engineering a new, expanded genetic alphabet as part of Kevin Esvelt’s Lab. In particular, she studied whether it we could engineer bacteria that use a genetic code based on larger four-base codons (rather than the usual three-base codons), which would vastly expand the genetic alphabet.
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Media Coverage: Could Life use a Longer Genetic Code?
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Media Coverage: Genetic Code: Expanding Codon Size
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Measuring the Tolerance of the Genetic Code to Altered Codon Size. Debenedictis et al. Elife
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Multiplex Suppression of Four Quadruplet Codons via TRNA Directed Evolution. Debenedictis et al. Nature communications
ROBOTICS-ACCELERATED EVOLUTION
During Erika’s PhD at MIT Biological engineering, she used laboratory automation to create PRANCE, a platform for protein engineering that is faster and more robust.
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Systematic Molecular Evolution Enables Robust Biomolecule Discovery. debenedictis et al. Nature Methods
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Media Coverage: MIT News
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Enabling High-ThroughPut Biology With Flexible Open-Source Automation. Chory el al. Molecular Systems Biology
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Systematic Molecular Evolution Using PRANCE, IC-CSYNB Seminar
Full-efficient Orbit Planning
Erika received a BS in Computer Science from Caltech in 2014. While at Caltech, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on mission design and orbit planning.
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Strategies for Fuel-Efficient Space Travel, TEDXINTEL
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The First Three Rungs of the Cosmological Distance Ladder
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Autonomous Navigation System for Spacecraft using Low-thrust Trajectories
