about ginkgo
Ginkgo BioWorks was founded in 2008 by five MIT PhDs. The company mission is to make biology easy to engineer. Only when biological engineering is fast and predictable will we fulfill the potenial of biological technologies to revolutionize the provision of food, medicine, energy, and materials.
Currently, Ginkgo is commercializing a suite of propietary DNA assembly technologies optimized to make the rapid construction of metabolic pathways and other gene networks simple.
Our offices and lab space are located in the Marine Industrial Park in Boston (with a beautiful view of the harbor!). Visit the contact page for more information.
Tom Knight, PhD
Tom Knight is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Tom is well-known for numerous seminal contributions to electrical engineering and computer science. He has over 30 patents and has started several companies including Symbolics, Exa, Polychip, Tenedos, Silicon Spice, High Speed Solutions, Permabit, Microdisplay, and Scalable Display Technologies. Considered by most to be a father of the field of synthetic biology, Tom Knight co-launched the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and the iGEM competition. He also invented the BioBrick® standard for physical composition of genetic parts that underpins the Registry and iGEM competition.
Email: tom at ginkgobioworks dot com
Jason Kelly, PhD
Jason hung around MIT for almost a decade receiving B.S
degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biology and a PhD in Biological
Engineering. He has expertise in developing tools to support the
directed evolution of genetic parts and in standardizing the
measurement of parts. During his graduate work, he designed and
distributed "measurement kits" that allow independent labs to report
measured promoter and RBS activity in common units so these parts
could be more easily re-used. Jason is a founder of OpenWetWare, a
community of life sciences researchers exploring ways to conduct
science more efficiently and openly.
Email: jason at
ginkgobioworks dot com
Reshma Shetty, PhD
Reshma Shetty graduated from MIT with a PhD in Biological Engineering
in 2008. She has expertise in the design and construction of synthetic
repressors and regulatable promoters in E. coli using zinc fingers and
leucine zippers. She also has published on a general approach for
building custom cloning vectors from BioBrick genetic parts. Reshma
Shetty has been active in the field for several years and co-organized
SB1.0, the first international conference in synthetic biology in
2004. She also spearheaded the use of OpenWetWare, a wiki for life
science researchers, as an educational tool when she helped teach an
MIT undergraduate laboratory course in synthetic biology in 2006. The
course demonstrated how wiki's can support university education and
has served as a model for university courses from institutions across
the country.
Email: reshma at ginkgobioworks dot com
Barry Canton, PhD
Barry Canton holds a BEng and an MEngSc from University
College Dublin in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD from MIT in
Biological Engineering. He has published pioneering work on the
refinement and characterization of genetically encoded biological
devices, building on the lessons of standardization from electronic
engineering. His work to produce the first datasheet for a biological
device serves as the prototype for device characterization in the MIT
Registry of Standard Biological Parts. During his graduate work, he
also constructed the first biological "virtual machine" a novel
expression system to make the operation of engineered systems in host
cells more reliable. Barry is also a founder of OpenWetWare, an
online community of life science researchers committed to open
science.
Email: barry at ginkgobioworks dot com
Austin Che, PhD
In 2001, Austin Che graduated from Stanford with
bachelor degrees in computer science and psychology, and in
2008, he finished his PhD at MIT in electrical engineering
and computer science. His goal is to make biological
engineering as easy as computer engineering. He has
experience in specifying assembly standards, simplifying
experimental procedures, and engineering RNA-based devices
for regulating gene expression and reporting on mRNA
levels. Austin co-organized SB1.0, the first international
conference in synthetic biology in 2004, and wrote the first
registry for standard biological parts. Austin is a founder
of OpenWetWare, a wiki for life science
researchers.
Email: austin at ginkgobioworks dot com
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