School of Engineering
Showing 171-180 of 332 Results
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Sarah Billington
The Gary Retelny and Family Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UPS Foundation Professor, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioMy research is driven by two questions: how do built environments impact human wellbeing, and how can human-centered engineering design improve and amplify these wellbeing impacts? We examine how built features shape wellbeing across diverse populations and settings. These features range from access to nature and material choices to the use of ambient intelligence systems. With this knowledge, we develop tools, methods, and design interventions to improve wellbeing. We pursue this work through direct collaboration with those most affected, from older adults and caregivers to residents, communities, and the workers and practitioners who shape the built environment itself. In the past, my group focused on the design and evaluation of sustainable, durable construction materials including bio-based composites and ductile cement-based composites.
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Lacramioara Bintu
Associate Professor of Bioengineering
BioLacra Bintu is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and a member of the Biophysics Program and Bio-X Institute at Stanford University. She earned undergraduate degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Neuroscience from Brandeis University. As an undergraduate working with Jane Kondev and Rob Phillips, she used statistical mechanics to model transcription factor binding and gene regulation. She completed her Physics Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley with Carlos Bustamante, where she used single-molecule approaches to study transcription on nucleosomal templates. As a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech with Michael Elowitz, she used live-cell microscopy to investigate chromatin-mediated gene regulation.
Her group seeks to discover fundamental principles of gene regulation and advance mammalian synthetic biology, with an emphasis on causal mechanisms, dynamic responses, and single-cell variability that enable signal integration at the population level. The lab develops tools to manipulate gene expression, for example by recruiting chromatin, transcriptional, or RNA regulators to defined genomic loci, or building DNA regulatory elements such as signal-responsive enhancers or silencers. To assess gene regulation responses at scale, the lab is using and developing new sequencing and imaging based techniques such as: delivery of large DNA libraries to cells coupled with sorting based on fluorescent and magnetic reporters, time-lapse fluorescence microscopy and in situ sequencing, or single-molecule footprinting of transcription factors and nucleosomes binding in live cells. Her group uses mathematical modeling to capture the fundamental principles underlying the observed gene expression responses and to predict new behaviors. This work provides insight into epigenetic mechanisms underlying development, cancer, and immune function and informs strategies for gene therapies that correct aberrant expression states.
Lacra lives in Menlo Park with her husband Anton and son Manu. They enjoy hiking, cooking, reading, playing board games, and watching birds in their backyard with their two cats.
