Portfolio
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.
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
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It’s Time for Intelligent Design, TEDxMIT
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Central New Mexico Research Challenge Keynote
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Thesis defense, Engineering exclusively-quadruplet codon translation in vivo
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 et al. Molecular Systems Biology
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Systematic molecular evolution using PRANCE, IC-CSynB Seminar
Fuel-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
