Life-Changing Science: The BioBuilder Podcast

Dave Westenberg, a Professor of Biological Sciences at Missouri University of Science & Technology, is widely known as a wonderful microbiologist, a great communicator and an exceptionally dedicated teacher. His students, be they undergraduates, high school teachers or public audiences, invariably feel empowered as scientists because Dave makes room for student curiosity, collaboration, and le...

Rebekah Ravgiala is an award-winning biotechnology teacher at Tyngsborough High School in Massachusetts. She attended the first BioBuilder teacher professional workshop at MIT in 2011 and was hooked. Her excitement about synthetic biology motivated her to lead her school's iGEM/BioBuilderClub teams year after year. In 2012, Rebekah registered and trained as an advanced BioBuilder instructor,...

Oscar is a rising junior at University of Massachusetts at Lowell, studying biology. His interest in biotechnology was sparked by a high school class and teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. He applied and was accepted to BioBuilder's High School Apprenticeship Challenge in 2019, held that year at LabCentral in Cambridge. His biodesign project addressed high concentrations of lead in...

Nancy is currently a Clinical Research Assistant at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She was one of the first BioBuilder Apprentices,  a workforce readiness program for Boston-area students in under-resourced local high schools. In 2021 she graduated from the University of Massachusetts -Dartmouth, where she majored in Psychology and minored in Biochemistry. In 2022, she has returne...

Chris Kuffner has been a longtime BioBuilder -- starting in high school at Acton-Boxborough  High School in Massachusetts almost a decade ago, and now he serves as a BioBuilderClub mentor and workshop instructor.  He pursued his early interest in synthetic biology at University of Maryland, where he participated in the hardware track of iGEM. His team engineered a -80 freezer that could be built f...

Jenny is a creative whose work designing the first BioBuilder website influenced her career path from biomedical engineer to successful luxury handbag maker, marketer, and woman-led business owner.  Learn more about BioBuilder's programs for students, educators, and industry professionals here 👉 https://biobuilder.org/ And follow BioBuilder on social media:  https://www.facebook.com/BioBuild...

Tian Shi is a senior at Georgetown University who came to BioBuilder's Learning Lab as a high school student and designed a biotechnology that she is now commercializing. She has also written a book on entrepreneurship and credits her work with BioBuilder for helping her see herself as an agent of change.  Learn more about BioBuilder's programs for students, educators, and industry profe...

Angela Girodier is a senior undergraduate student at Emmanuel College, majoring in biology and secondary education. She is an alumna of the BioBuilder Apprenticeship Program. In this podcast, she describes how a science scavenger hunt in 8th grade and a grant proposal she wrote for her high school biotech program put her a path to a science career. These experiences revealed the fun, creative, and...

Zeeshan Siddiqui, BioBuilder's podcast host, notes:  A particular topic of conversation I found really insightful was hearing about BioBuilder's tried and tested model over the past 10 years, where you start a curriculum in a school district and an area, you then start the Clubs in that area. Then you have cohorts that go through all the programming and you develop your teacher base ther...

Karen is a legal and healthcare executive, entrepreneur, and business development leader. She is currently the Deputy Director at the Office of Behavioral Health at MassHealth. Karen was one of the very first members on the BioBuilder Board of Directors. She helped shepherd the nonprofit from its earliest days, oversaw significant expansion of the Board, and helped BioBuilder keep its content free...

Amin Hajimorad earned his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, and his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Amin is currently an associate professor at California State University, Chico. He first got involved with BioBuilder back in 2010, where he worked on developing lab content and synthetic biology wor...

Kevin Fuentes is a first generation Salvadoran-American now studying chemical engineering and biochemistry at Tufts University. He discovered BioBuilder when Dr. Kuldell gave a presentation to one of his science classes. He completed the Apprenticeship Challenge in the spring of 2019 and did his internship at BioBuilder during the summer, testing the synthetic biology lab kits that BioBuilder prov...

Lindsey L'Ecuyer is an award-winning biotechnology teacher at Andover High School in Massachusetts. She has been empowering students to become independent learners for over 13 years. She is also a BioBuilder Ambassador and as part of her BioBuilderClub, Lindsey’s students have appeared on local news stations, published in the journal BioTreks, and were finalists in the international Spellman...

Viggy just completed his senior year at Westborough High School, in Westborough, a small town in central Massachusetts. He was first truly exposed to synthetic biology through BioBuilder's bacterial transformation lab, "What a Colorful World." From there, he partnered with his high school biology teacher to bring the BioBuilderClub to Westborough High School. Since then, Viggy has a...

Learn more about BioBuilder's programs for students, educators, and industry professionals here 👉 https://biobuilder.org/ And follow BioBuilder on social media:  https://www.facebook.com/BioBuilderFoundation/ https://twitter.com/SystemsSally https://www.youtube.com/@BioBuilder https://www.instagram.com/systems_sally/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/16132078

Jude Clapper started teaching synthetic bio at Taipei American School (TAS) in 2013 after attending one of Natalie Kuldell's Biobuilder workshops at MIT. He is now the chair of Scientific Research at the school, as well as an advisor for their iGEM team - which has won three high school grand prizes and countless nominations, as well as inspiring hundreds of kids to pursue scientific research...

Katie Hart is an assistant professor at Williams College and a member of the BioBuilder educational foundation board. Katie has spent several years running BioBuilder professional development workshops  at UC Berkeley for teachers interested in incorporating the BB curriculum into their classrooms. She is also one of the authors of the amazing BB “Synthetic Bio in the lab” textbook. Learn more abo...

Karen Ingram is a creative director, designer, and artist who uses her skill set to promote scientific awareness. With an origin in painting and textile design, Ingram's professional experience has traversed the arenas of digital design and art direction, creative strategy, event curation, and synthetic biology. She is also one of the authors and illustrators for the BioBuilder “Synthetic Bio...

About the host Zeeshan Siddiqui is a Synthetic Biologist from Sydney, Australia. He completed his undergrad in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics from UNSW, Sydney. In 2020, he joined the iGEM team as an ambassador, with the goal of promoting science communication and education. He intends to pursue a PhD in protein engineering, as well as launch an online science journalism platform about susta...

Julie Legault is designer-entrepreneur from the city of Montreal. She is also the co-founder of Amino Labs, an MIT spinout that builds hardware and synthetic biology products making genetic engineering accessible to children and non-scientists. Join us for this very exciting episode as Julie walks us through her transition from designer to synthetic biologist, the key role BioBuilder played in thi...