in high school, what I was really interested in was math and art... and I went on this mission as an undergrad to find classes that fit those interests. And funnily enough ended up in biology because of the visual aspects and how beautiful some of the organisms were.

Dr. Jenn Brophy is an assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.

In a conversation taped on January 21st 2022, we caught up with Dr. Jenn Brophy, who has recently joined the Stanford Bioengineering faculty. Jenn’s work has been interdisciplinary and collaborative at every stage of her career, including her PhD at MIT, her post-doc at Stanford and now as she starts her own lab. Her brand new lab — just 4 months old — is still getting set up, but her plan is to apply some of the synthetic biology tools and circuits that have been developed in a plant model organism and study how they work (or don’t) in more useful crop species. 

Jenn aims to attract students who are interested in applying current plant engineering tools to address sustainability challenges. She anticipates student projects will take complementary approaches, but her team will all share a tremendous enthusiasm for finding the best and fastest way to engineer useful plants.