People

Erika Alden DeBenedictis
PrincipAL Investigator

Erika began her science career as a computational physicist and astronomer and worked on space mission design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She received a BS in Computer science from Caltech in 2014. She then worked at Dropbox as a software engineer and at D. E. Shaw Research on computational biophysics.

She received a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT in 2020, working with Kevin Esvelt. Erika’s research focused on developing techniques for robotics-accelerated evolution (PRANCE) and applying these techniques to quadruplet codon genetic code expansion and origin of life research in E. coli. Her postdoc in David Baker’s lab at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington focused on using machine learning techniques to systematically engineer de novo proteins.

In 2022, she founded Align to Innovate, a nonprofit designed to make experimental life science more reproducible, scalable and sharable by giving researchers access to programmable experiments through programs like the Bioautomation Challenge. She now leads Pioneer Labs, a Focused Research Organization engineering microbes for Mars.