Team:Duke/Advisors

Our Wonderful Team of Advisors

Advisors

	Michael Lynch Michael Lynch MD, PhD is a rather attractive assistant professor of both Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He received both his Ph.D and M.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He always wears a blue lab coat and smiles with his perfect white teeth at everything, even when lab plans go awry. His research focuses on modifying bacterial pathways to produce chemicals essential for applications such as pharmacology and industry.
Adim Moreb Adim is a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering department. He joined the Lynch lab in 2015. His work focuses on improving the speed and efficiency of genome engineering in bacteria.
	John Decker John is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Originally from middle Tennessee, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he earned a B.S. in Neuroscience and conducted research on eye movements and stereoscopic vision in humans. Outside of school and the lab, John enjoys the outdoors, literature, and fencing, and also holds a private pilot's license.

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Mentors

Johnathon Burg Jonathan obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry with Prof. Dewey G. McCafferty at Duke University concentrating his research efforts on the kinetic and biophysical characterization of KDM1A. In the Lynch Lab, Jonathan is focused on the engineering of a dynamic metabolic engineering platform for yeast, including aspects of both strain and bioprocess development.
	Zhixia Ye Zhixia was born in China and got her Ph.D. in Chemistry from NC State in 2014. She enjoys reading and traveling in her free time. Zhixia has been leading efforts aimed at developing a dynamic metabolic engineering platform in the bacterium E. coli. Zhixia's work is leading to sustainable processes for the production of numerous chemicals, natural products and natural product derivatives.
Charlie Cooper Charlie's current projects involve engineering microbes and enzymes for renewable production of bulk chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials. He spends his spare time maintaining a collection of orchids and befriending neighborhood cats.
	Jennifer Hennigan Jen earned her BS in chemistry from Stetson University in 2015. She is a chemistry PhD student with research interests at the interface of chemistry and biomedical engineering. Her current projects include enhancing the production of pharmaceuticals in E. coli and developing advanced therapies for pancreatic cancer. In her spare time, Jen plays field hockey with the TarDevils adult team.
Romel Menacho-Melgar Romel is a Biomedical Engineering PhD student. Originally from Peru, he came to the US to the University of South Carolina to earn a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2009. He started his graduate studies at Duke in 2013 and joined the Lynch Lab in 2015. His project involves developing a platform for in vivo peptide lipidation for novel materials and pharmaceuticals
	Daniel Rodriguez My research focuses on constructing mathematical models of metabolic pathways that guide the engineering of bacteria for optimized chemical synthesis. An additional goal of my research is to elucidate more fundamental aspects of bacterial physiology, such as unknown metabolic control mechanisms, by investigating inconsistencies between in silico and in vivo behavior.