Dhriti Rao
Dhriti is a second year PhD student. She completed her undegraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Genetics. Currently in the lab, she is interested in understanding the fitness effects of recoding genomes.
Gonzalo Mendoza
Gonzalo is from Mexico. He did his PhD in Edinburgh, studying mRNA splicing in budding yeast. He then moved to Cambridge to work on SynBio in microalgae as a postdoc. Now in the Robertson group, he works on synthetic genomics tools for an anaerobic gut bacterium.
Angus Armstrong
Angus studied Biological Sciences at Durham University for his BSc before moving to Imperial College London to undertake an MSc in Applied Biosciences and Biotechnology. In the lab, he is currently working on using functional genomics approaches to improve the fitness of recoded bacteria in the gut.
Rodrigue Lefèvre-Morand
Rodrigue is a PhD student in synthetic biology from France. He is specifically interested in building bridges between the fields of synthetic genomics and genetic code expansion. As he tends to be clumsy, he has developed strong automation skills and is always looking for a way to streamline protocols and run them on his beloved liquid-handler.
Wes Robertson
Wes is a group leader from the US, where he did his undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his PhD at Yale University, where he gained his initial interest in synthetic biology. As a postdoctoral scientist, he jumped across the pond to join the lab of Prof Jason Chin at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. In the summer of 2024, he started his own lab at the LMB, where they pursue synthetic genomics research to advance the fields of bacterial genome design and total genome synthesis.