Dr. Mary Dunlop is Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
In a special conversation recorded on November 15th, 2022, Mary talked with her graduate student, Michael Sheets, about her own educational journey and unexpected career path from mechanical engineering to synthetic biology to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Growing up, Mary never thought she would be a professor, or even work in biology. As she finished high school, she had discovered she enjoyed math and physics, and found role models in mechanical engineering, so she decided to study that as an undergraduate at Princeton and then as a graduate student at CalTech. After a postdoc in her lab pointed out that she would make a good professor, Mary applied for faculty positions and now leads a synthetic biology research lab at Boston University. Most recently, Mary took a sabbatical at Imperial College in London, where she explored the use of AI in synthetic biology.
As a graduate student in Mary’s lab, Michael Sheets works on optogenetic control of microbes, using light to control when genes are active. Thank you, Michael, for hosting this Career Conversation!