About me

I am an Engineering Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with James J. Collins at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. My research focuses on antimicrobial resistance and engineered living therapeutics—using synthetic biology, microbial engineering, and genetic circuits to design living systems that can address human-health challenges.

Current research

• Engineered living therapeutics: designing microorganisms that can sense and respond to disease-relevant signals.
• Antimicrobial resistance: developing genetic approaches to target antibiotic-resistance genes in complex microbial communities.
• Microbial CRISPR and genetic circuits: creating portable tools for programming diverse bacterial species, with applications in metabolic engineering and microbiome engineering.

I earned my Ph.D. in Molecular Engineering and Sciences at the University of Washington, where I worked with James Carothers and Jesse Zalatan. During my doctoral research, I developed portable CRISPR-based gene-regulation technologies for programming diverse bacterial species, with applications in metabolic engineering and genetic circuitry.

At MIT, I am exploring how engineered microbes and microbial communities can be used to combat antimicrobial resistance. I am particularly interested in developing genetic approaches that target antibiotic-resistance genes in complex microbiomes and in connecting these approaches with AI-assisted antibiotic discovery.

Selected research

• How many plasmids can bacteria carry? A synthetic biology perspective — Open Biology (2025)
• Systematic Mapping of Bacterial CRISPRa Systems for Synergistic Gene Activation Reveals Antagonistic Effects — ACS Synthetic Biology (2025)
• Portable bacterial CRISPR transcriptional activation enables metabolic engineering in Pseudomonas putida — Metabolic Engineering (2021)

Background

I was born and raised in Thailand and received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Organic Chemistry from Mahidol University. I later joined the founding team of the School of Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering at VISTEC, where I worked on enzyme biocatalysis before moving into synthetic biology.

Outside the lab, I enjoy hiking, surfing, climbing, Muay Thai, and cooking Thai food. Check out my Instagram for photos of nature, travel, and culture.

Community engagement

I am actively involved in building engineering-biology communities in the United States, Thailand, and internationally. I previously served as a board member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) Student and Postdoc Association (SPA), helping foster connections across the synthetic-biology community.

Through connections formed at EBRC, I helped co-found SynBio4ALL, an initiative created to expand access to synthetic-biology education for African students. I have also supported the development of Thailand’s synthetic-biology community through teaching, public communication, and the Thailand Synthetic Biology Consortium.

I also contribute to How To Grow (Almost) Anything, a global synthetic-biology course based at MIT and Harvard. As a member of the teaching staff, I support laboratory and recitation instruction in areas including DNA assembly, cell-free systems, and CRISPR-based metabolic engineering.