User:Reshma P. Shetty

I just completed my Ph.D. in biological engineering, advised by Tom Knight's lab and co-advised by Drew Endy.

Education

• Ph.D. in Biological Engineering at MIT, 2008.
• B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, 2002.

Current research

My current work is in the area of synthetic biology.

• Ph.D. thesis
• FAQ and thoughts: my own answers to frequently asked questions and objections to the field as well as thoughts on related experimental issues.

Other related discussions and projects in which I am involved.

• BioBricks: a one stop shop for all BioBricks related information and projects.
• Abstraction hierarchy: thinking about a framework within which to engineer synthetic biological systems.
• A new BioBricks vector design: designing a new, extensible BioBricks vector scaffold.
• A standard strain for BioBricks: specifying a standard strain in which BioBricks parts, devices and systems would operate.
• Standards for parts characterization: thinking about what BioBricks characterization standards might look like.
• Barcodes for synthetic biological systems

Teaching

• MIT iGEM: I served as an advisor to the 2006 MIT iGEM team. (iGEM is an acronym for international Genetically Engineering Machines competition.) The team won "Best System" for engineering bacteria to smell like wintergreen and banana over the course of a single summer.
• BE.109: Laboratory fundamentals of biological engineering: I was a teaching assistant for BE.109 in Spring 2006. Natalie Kuldell and I experimented with the integration of BE.109 and OpenWetWare.
• BE.490: Foundations of Computational & Systems Biology: In Spring 2004, I was a teaching assistant for BE.490.

Previous research

• Prior to coming to MIT, I spent a few months in Tom Blundell's lab at the University of Cambridge working on RAPPER: ab initio conformational search algorithm for restraint-based protein structure modeling.
• Before that, I worked as an undergrad research assistant for several years in Baldomero Olivera's lab at the University of Utah. I worked on a few different projects during that time including the identification of the post-translational modification enzyme γ-glutamyl carboxylase in Conus and Drosophila. Also, I helped to discover two novel superfamilies of neurotoxins from the venom of the molluscs Conus.

See my publications.

Honors

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2005-2007.
• Whitaker Graduate Fellowship in Biomedical Engineering, 2002-2004.
• Andrew and Edna Viterbi Fellowship in Computational Biology, 2002-2003.

Activities

Some non-research but still important discussions and projects in which I am participating.

• OpenWetWare: a wiki for researchers in biological science and engineering to enable more sharing and collaboration in the research community. I serve on the OpenWetWare steering committee. Here are my contributions to the site.
• iGEM: I served as a part-time iGEM 2006 ambassador to Asia.
• Publishing: can we improve the publishing system in synthetic biology?
  • To this end, I helped set up the MIT DSpace synthetic biology publishing archive. Check out the archive by date by author
• Synthetic Society Working Group: a working group exploring societal issues around synthetic biology.
• Previously, I also helped to organize Synthetic Biology 1.0: The First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology.

Contact

Reshma Shetty
MIT CSAIL
32 Vassar Street, Room 32-311
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
617.253.5814
rshetty AT mit DOT edu

Miscellaneous

• Reshma Shetty/blog <-- trying out a blog
• We made Slashdot!
• CNN Money has an article called "Big jobs that pay badly." The three examples they cite: architect, chef and academic research scientist.
• The other kind of biobricks.
• Google, Venter and genomics ... oh my!
• Quarter-Life-Crisis: outlet for the artistically inclined twenty-something. (Shameless plug for a friend's website.)
• The Mechanome