Students

Henrico Adrian

Henrico is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney and a top-up scholar within the CSIRO Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform. His research is focused on utilising the advantages of cell-free protein synthesis to unlock new strategies for protein nanocage engineering. These include incorporating unnatural amino acids in vitro to functionalise nanocage surfaces, developing a high-throughput prototyping pipeline to rapidly test novel nanocage designs, and constructing artificial cells using nanocages as functional pseudo-organelles.

Daniel’s PhD includes collaborations between UQ, TUM, DTU, and CSIRO, leveraging international expertise to push the boundaries of microbial biotechnology. Daniel applies genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and systems biology to enhance Pseudomonas putida for sustainable bioprocesses. His research focuses on engineering microbial metabolism to convert industrial waste streams into valuable chemicals by integrating model-guided metabolic and redox engineering. This approach reduces reliance on refined sugars and improves carbon efficiency, advancing a circular bioeconomy.

Goncagul is a doctoral candidate in law, with her research project jointly supervised by the University of Queensland, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, and CSIRO’s Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform. Her research explores legal mechanisms to protect technical standards from the potential restrictive effects of intellectual property, ensuring that the standards function effectively to enable interoperability, reproducibility, safety, and scalability. Her work addresses normative concerns in standardization processes by proposing legal frameworks that facilitate the development of standards which are readily available, easily accessible, reproducible, transparent, and transmittable within the fields of synthetic biology and biomanufacturing, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and prosperous global future.

Jesus is a PhD Student based at ANU. His work with CSIRO and ANU aims to develop a new yeast-surface display platform to screen nanobodies for binding to specific antigens, that later can be extended to other protein binding scaffolds, such as affibodies or sherpabodies, with modular antigen binding loop diversity generated by combinatorial golden gate cloning.

Irfan is currently pursuing his PhD at Queensland University of Technology. His research centers on developing highly specific biosensors to detect and quantify small molecules within microbial cells. This involves applying directed evolution and in silico approaches to design chemically induced dimerization (CID) systems that control various biosensor architectures. These biosensors offer a minimally invasive technique to monitor intracellular metabolite levels in real time, supporting the optimization of microbial strains for industrially relevant compounds such as isoprenoids.

Darcy is a PhD candidate who has been associated with the Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform since its inception. His current research focuses on understanding the challenges emerging biotechnology faces outside the lab – particularly how public perception influences adoption. Through comparing how various stakeholders perceive livestock mRNA vaccines, plastic degrading enzymes and carbon capturing bacteria, he hopes to discover insights that can maximise the uptake of these technologies.

Dani is a PhD student at the Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, exploring how cells come together to form complex multicellular systems. Her work focuses on engineering tools for programmable cell adhesion, enabling the controlled assembly of structured, functional microbial communities. By designing synthetic consortia with coordinated biosynthetic capabilities, she aims to advance biomanufacturing approaches for producing high-value compounds that are challenging to synthesise in single-host systems.

Nathan is a PhD student at the Australian National University (ANU) specialising in Chemical and Synthetic Biology. His research focuses on expanding the genetic code of bacteria to incorporate novel, non-natural amino acids into proteins and peptides. This approach enables the generation and simultaneous screening of innovative drug-like molecules for therapeutic potential.

Francisco is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and a recipient of a CSIRO Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform top-up scholarship. His research focuses on developing precision fermentation strategies to enhance single-cell factories, driving the industrial translation of the current boom in biotech. He is mainly interested in creating microbial platforms capable of producing high-value products from low-value carbon sources.

Rashika is a PhD student based at Macquarie University. Her research focuses on developing highly specific biosensors—devices that detect target molecules by converting biological interactions into measurable signals. These biosensors offer rapid and cost-effective solutions for applications, such as medical diagnostics, drug discovery, and environmental pollutant monitoring. A major challenge in biosensor design is identifying protein binding pairs that interact with a target molecule in a sandwich-like manner. Rashika (and her team) are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated libraries of protein binders tailored to our target molecules. To screen for novel binding pairs, she is developing a high-throughput screening technique, Simultaneous Yeast Display (SYD), alongside a traditional yeast three-hybrid (Y3H) screening method.