Current Lab Members
Prof. Enoch Yeung
is the director of the Biological Control Laboratory and an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at UCSB. He is also a member of the Center for Biological Engineering, Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program, and the Center for Control, Dynamics, and Computation. His research interests lie at the interface of synthetic biology, control theory, and data science.
Codebase: YeungRepo
Jamiree Harrisson
is a 5th year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include mathematical modeling, machine learning, synthetic biology, dynamical systems, and control.
Charles Johnson
is a 4th year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include dynamic systems, control theory, mathematical modeling and system identification.
Alec Taylor
is a 3rd year PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering program. His research interests are in synthetic biology, systems biology, protein engineering, and data science.
Olivia Simon
is a Dos Pueblos High School student. She is attending Northeastern University as a freshman in the fall semester of 2023 to major in Cell and Molecular Biology. She has a passion for studying the biological systems of life and has worked on a few projects in bioengineering at UCSB in the Biological Control Lab. She studied the adaptive metabolism of Acinetobacter baylyi using sugar titrations in hopes of understanding adaptation mechanisms in Acinetobacter baumannii. She is working on building a set of magnetic tweezers to study DNA supercoiling, as well as learning to clone plasmid DNA using PCR and Golden gate processes. In the future, she would like to combine genetics, molecular biology, and marine science to work towards hopefully saving coral reefs from climate change.
Harris Clark
is an 2nd year undergraduate student at UCSB pursuing a degree in Chemical Engineering. He is examining the effect of CRIPSRi on gene transcription and supercoiling using deterministic and stochastic modeling approaches.
Harnoor Lal
Harnoor Lal is a 4th year undergraduate student in the Mechanical Engineering program. His research interests are in machine learning, controls, and computational engineering, with a focus on interpretability and efficiency.
Chris Muray
is a 4th year physics undergrad. He is interested in observing and modeling the physical mechanisms underlying biological systems. He began research in the Pruitt Lab, writing video processing scripts to analyze beating cardiomyocyte nuclear geometry. In the BCL, he is working on a stochastic model of DNA supercoiling for different compositional contexts. He hopes to pursue a Masters degree in computer science to explore machine learning and computing for scientific applications.
Daniel Park
is a 4th year Mechanical Engineering undergraduate. He is developing biotechnology to enact temporal encodings using a suite of genetic sensors developed by Aqib Hasnain, Shara Balakrishnan, Dennis Joshy, Steve Haase and Jen Smith.
Annelise Fuhrer
Annelise is a graduating senior at Dos Pueblos High School and plans to study biochemistry at Northeastern University. Her research interests include synthetic biology, CRISPR, drug development, and drug delivery.
Annie Nguyen
is a fourth year undergraduate student majoring in pharmacology. Her interests lie in bacterial and viral pathogenesis and the discovery of their respective pharmaceutical therapies. She is currently working in the Biological Control Lab under supervision of Dr. Yeung to observe how cell fate of bacteria is altered as a result of gene refactoring within specific gene clusters or pathogenicity islands.
Claire Kuykendall
is a 4th year Cellular and Developmental Biology major. Her research interests are in genetics, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and systems biology. She is currently working on a project investigating translational control by targeting mRNA using the deactivated CRISPR-CasRx system with PhD student Alec Taylor.
Yizhuo Yin
is a 2nd year PhD student in Chemistry and Biochemistry. His research interests include molecular biology, biophysics, mathematical modeling, machine learning, dynamical systems, and control.
Visiting Scholars
Brian Brown
Brian Brown is a visiting PhD student in computer science from Brigham Young University, working with professors David Grimsman and Sean Warnick. His research interests lie at the intersection of nonlinear model reduction, machine learning, control theory, and biological systems. He has a master’s degree in Environmental Science and a B.S. in Bioinformatics. If a system learns, grows, or evolves, Brian is interested in studying, modeling, and engineering it. Google Scholar, Linkedin.
Lab Alumni
Linus Rydell
graduated with his Bachelor’s degree majoring in Mechanical Engineering with University Honors in June 2023. While in the Biological Control Lab, he worked with Aqib Hasnain to discover a novel fingerprinting method for synthetic gene circuits in living cells. His capstone team designed a surgical device to improve spinal surgery, eventually receiving the top prize at the Annual Design Showcase in Mechanical Engineering. He will be pursuing a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCSB starting Fall of 2023.
Michael Zheng
graduated with his Bachelor’s degree double majoring in Statistics and Biochemistry in June 2023. While in the Biological Control Lab, he worked with Aleczander Taylor and Claire Kuykendall to develop a functional variant of CRISPR for RNA regulation. He will be pursuing a Master’s degree in Computational Biology from Carnegie Mellon University starting Fall of 2023.
Aqib Hasnain
graduated with his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in June 2023. While in the Biological Control Lab, he pursued research in synthetic biology, computational biology, machine learning, and modeling Koopman operators. After his PhD, he accepted a postdoctoral scholar position at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working with Dr. Dawn Chiniquy.
Shara Rhagha Wardhan Balakrishnan
earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in June 2023. While in the Biological Control Lab, he developed new methods for decomposing nonlinear observable subspaces, using Koopman operator methods. He explored the application of these new methods for adjusting biomass and growth rate of Pseudomonads, using CRISPRi controllers. He is now the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of AviAI.
Ines Bilkic
graduated in 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. While in the Biological Control Lab, she worked on projects relating to pathogenesis and genome integration. After graduation, she pursued a full time position at FM Global as a consultant engineer.
Yi Ling Yang
Yi Ling graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. After graduation, she pursued a position in biotechnology . While in the Biological Control Lab, she researched new methods for producing anthocyanin compounds on bio-enhanced surfaces.
Jackson Bright
graduated in 2021 in with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. His interests are in design and sustainability. While in the lab, he developed and optimized chemical assays for degradation of byproducts associated with plastic breakdown.
Alex Nguyen
Alex graduated in 2019 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is now pursuing a PhD in controls at UC Irvine. While in the Biological Control Lab, he researched new methods for synthesis of genetics circuits for nonlinear biological systems.
Andy Cai
graduated in 2018 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. He also was a junior research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His background was in design, fabrication, and all things mechanical engineering. He worked on optimization of genetic circuits for nutrient-sparse environments.
Nibodh Boddupalli
Nibodh graduated with a Master’s Degree student in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently pursuing a PhD with a focus in dynamics and controls in UCSB’s Mechanical Engineering department with Professor Jeff Moehlis. His research interests include theory and application of Koopman operator methods, system identification, design of experiments, and data-responsive machine learning models.
Dennis M Joshy
is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include fluid mechanics, mechanobiology, and bioengineering. While in the Biological Control Lab, he studied how DNA integration in the genome affects neighboring gene transcription. He also developed a tool to design circuits from sketches of their dynamical behavior: Sketch-A-Net.