Category: Bioworker Spotlight

We’re excited for our next interview in our day-in-the-life series! Here we hear from Kristen Tran, one of Ginkgo’s first ever Automation Engineers, on her path to Ginkgo and what she’s looking forward to in 2020. 

How did you find this industry and this role? What was your path to Ginkgo?

Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in biomedical engineering. I did my undergrad at the University of Texas, then came to Boston for graduate school at Boston University. After graduating from BU, I was at a networking event for women in science and engineering, and connected with a manager at Merck Pharmaceuticals, who asked me a question I’d never considered—was I interested in automation?

As it turns out, I was very interested, and my career as an automation engineer began! I already had a solid base of engineering knowledge from my education, but I built my expertise in lab automation through hands-on work. I had been at Merck for about 6 years when a friend of mine, who was working at Ginkgo, got in touch about the company’s automation team—which at that time was just one person (Jeff Lou, still our head of automation today!)—and I realized I had found my next step.

I was really excited about the prospect of building something new, and between that, and all the amazing things the company was working on, I was sold, and joined Ginkgo back in 2015 as the first member of the automation team. These days, we are a team of 13 and growing!

What is the automation team’s role and impact at Ginkgo? 

Our team is in charge of automating manual processes within Ginkgo’s foundries. This means lifting all kinds of manual work off of our foundry engineers in the lab—not only automating processes they would normally need to do by hand, but also helping them to scale processes beyond human capacity, processing thousands of samples each day at nanoliter scale.

This is important work because it gives our foundry engineers more time to do what’s really valuable for them—developing new tools and processes to engineer biology. For instance, we were able to program our acoustic liquid handler to perform 2D full factorial experiments to optimize how we sequence our engineered microbes.

We do this by designing and implementing custom system integrations combining off the shelf and custom hardware and software elements—enabling our foundry engineers to program and execute personalized protocols on our automated systems.

How does the automation team at Ginkgo operate, and what is your role within the team? 

On the automation team at Ginkgo, everyone does a little bit of everything. We’re very cross-disciplinary, working across hardware, software and biological process implementation. That said, we all have different strengths—largely due to the fact that we all come from different engineering backgrounds. On the team now, we have mechanical engineers, an aerospace engineer, chemical engineers, and biomedical engineers. There are some team members that came to Ginkgo right out of school, other industries, or have been working in the lab automation space for years. It’s really this mix of expertise and career backgrounds that allows the team to operate so effectively.

As the most senior member on the team, I tend to play a more strategic role in guiding and overseeing projects that come in. I also serve as a liaison between our team and all the other teams at Ginkgo—a part of my job I really enjoy, because it gives me a holistic view of everything the company is working on and where my team can help. Along with this higher level work I still very much get my hands dirty on ongoing projects, contributing directly on engineering implementation and helping to configure and design new systems, while also supporting our current systems.

While it’s not necessarily part of my job description, I’m also heavily involved in our hiring process, because I believe that at the end of the day, our strongest asset is our team. Making sure that we have the strongest, most diverse team of engineers that we can so that we continue to scale that team and deliver the best results for Ginkgo is incredibly important.

What does your day-to-day look like?

A typical day varies! It can involve anything from troubleshooting specific instruments or processes, working hands-on in the lab, installing or optimizing software or hardware—to longer-term work, working on the design and architecture of future projects. There are so many different implementation and design aspects to this job.

There’s an operations aspect as well, making sure that people understand what our platforms are capable of, training new users and helping with any issues they might have. We need to understand on an operations level if there is anything that we need to improve, and help our teams to make the most of the platforms we design and implement.

What is your favorite part of your job, or what makes you the most excited?

So for me, personally, one of my favorite things is that this job creates a lot of opportunities for variety and cross-disciplinary challenges. Since a day is so variable, there are always new problems to solve.

Another thing I love about this particular role and this team is that, because we’re a core infrastructure team at Ginkgo, I get to work with basically everyone at the company, from the foundry teams to business development and project leads. Not only does this give our team the opportunity to discover and drive efficiencies across the business, we also get a front row seat to all the latest developments across teams—an early look at the latest and greatest at Ginkgo.

The automation team is able to, within the course of our regular work, develop a truly holistic view of the company. This gives us a unique opportunity to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle that is Ginkgo fit together.

What is Ginkgo working on that you’re most excited about?

I honestly can’t name one specific project! What really excites me is that Ginkgo is working on a more diverse set of projects and problems than almost anyone else out there, whether from a customer perspective or a platform perspective. And we’re constantly working to expand the scope and complexity of the problems and challenges we tackle.

One goal of our team specifically is to help build the most flexible platform we can here at Ginkgo, that can both scale AND adapt —and that’s incredibly exciting. You don’t often see both of those factors combined and for us, it’s a key focus, and one that is critical to Ginkgo’s success.

What is one of your goals for 2020?

I would love to see more diverse applicants applying for our team—both in terms of their career  backgrounds (spoiler alert: you don’t have to be a synthetic biologist to work here!) and individual experience. Ginkgo welcomes and celebrates diversity of all kinds and frankly, we’re a stronger company for that.

To apply to our automation team, head over here.

 

 

Today, in our series exploring the day-to-day lives and interests of Ginkgo employees, we talk with Dawn Thompson, Head of Next Generation Sequencing and Senior Biological Engineer at Ginkgo.

 

 

How did you become involved in your industry? Tell us a little bit about your background and the path that brought you to Ginkgo.

I’m a biologist primarily because I love understanding how things work. I’m a geneticist, with the bulk of my training in genomics. The most exciting thing about genomics to me is understanding how the DNA in your genome gets translated into particular characteristics, and how the contents of your genome can be decoded to determine what makes you, you. Of course, people are really complicated, from a DNA perspective, so the simplest way to practice genomics is to look at a simple organism. That’s why I decided to focus on microbial biology. Microbes are fascinating; they live everywhere on the planet — glaciers, volcanoes, even on us — and they do all these fantastic things.

When I was just starting out as a geneticist in graduate school, I was studying one gene at a time, but I knew to really work in genomics I would need to understand entire genomes. I joined the Broad Institute, an arm of MIT and Harvard that was launched in 2004 to improve human health using genomics, and worked there for 9 years studying genomes and their characteristics.

I loved my time at the Broad Institute, but every 10 years or so, I like to look at my career and think: What other cool stuff is there to learn in biology that I haven’t explored yet? To me, synthetic biology was the obvious next step. Synthesizing DNA was getting cheaper, as was sequencing, meaning we could now both “write” (synthesize) and read (sequence) genes in a cheap, high-throughput way. That opened up all kinds of ways to use synthetic biology to understand the functions of cells and program them to serve new functions.

Ginkgo Bioworks was the perfect opportunity to explore synthetic biology and combine my interest in microbes, my expertise in evolution and genomics, and my passion for understanding how things work on a biological level. This August, I’ll be celebrating three years there, leading out next generation sequencing team.

Tell us a little about your role –  what’s the high-level impact you have on Ginkgo?

Ginkgo is divided into two primary departments, foundry teams and customer-facing teams, and as part of my role as a senior biological engineer I’m involved in both sides of the business.

My primary responsibilities are on the foundry side, providing services and support for internal Ginkgo teams and helping our organism engineers determine which of our organism designs are working the best. To do this, my team and I leverage Ginkgo’s next generation sequencing platform (which I played a primary role in creating), allowing the organism engineers to sequence the constructs they use in their organism engineering and sequencing those organisms so that the engineering teams can understand their genomic sequence and ultimately design them.

My team is about 10 people right now, a mix of scientists handling the gene sequencing and bio-mathematicians who can analyze the resulting data.

When Ginkgo takes on a new project, we often have a new microbe that we want to work in. My team is one of the first steps in that process. We call it “onboarding a new host organism.” Typically, we can design something on the computer and understand what the sequence will be. But in order to do that, you need to first understand the full genomic sequence of an organism. So for new host organisms we’ll do a custom project where we do several types of sequencing, a lot of computational analysis and then generate what’s called the “reference genome” for them. It’s a really collaborative process.

A real benefit Ginkgo — and our team specifically — offers to our internal engineers is that, because of our next generation mix of automation, we can do all of this in high throughput work cheaply and quickly, speeding up the overall engineering cycle and get answers fast.

What’s most exciting to you about the work Ginkgo is doing right now?

Our new agtech company Joyn is super cool. About 15 years ago I was trying to figure out my career, and was fascinated by the idea of going out in the field to sequence organisms in the oceans and soil. Now that’s actually some of the work we’re doing with Joyn as we try to figure out how to engineer a microbe that can live in the soil and help plants grow, replacing nitrogen fertilizer with a more “green” process.

Our tagline is, we’re trying to make biology easier to engineer. In order to do that, we need to understand biology better — and identify the common themes and designs that will help speed up our process.

That will allow us to replace a really labor-intensive, expensive, resource-demanding process with something very green. You can make a lot of stuff both cheaply, and not use a lot of resources that create problems with waste that you need to dispose of. Biomanufacturing is a very cool green process.

Mother nature is the best engineer! If we source all the biodiversity in nature and understand what’s in the genomes in those organisms, it opens up a wide range of functionality. Ginkgo is well on its way to demonstrate that this is a technology that is not only here to stay but can be leveraged to create anything — to make textiles, to replace plastics. If we do it right, we don’t need petroleum based plastics anymore!

What do you love most about your job?

It’s hard to pick just one thing, but one of the things I love the most about my work at Ginkgo is that we are using state-of-the art methods to interrogate so many aspects of cellular function. Our sophisticated automation allows us to do this at scale, taking a holistic approach to organism engineering. This is a powerful and versatile way to create organisms for our customers; the resources at Ginkgo allows us to interrogate biology in a way we haven’t be able to previously. We can understand biology on an entirely new level and in turn identify common themes or design principles that can be then be used for a wide variety of applications. It’s almost limitless.

 

Today we’re introducing a new series that will help you get to know our Ginkgo employees a little better, and share more information on what happens behind the scenes in our foundries and beyond. First up, we’re going “behind the biotech” with Emily Greenhagen, our Head of Deployment.

 

 

How did you get involved in your industry? Tell us a little bit about your background and the path that brought you to Ginkgo.

I earned my bachelor’s degree in biology from MIT. As an undergrad, I worked on cancer research and while it was really interesting, over time I realized that even though I’m trained as a scientist, I’m more motivated by applying the research. I want to make an impact on the world in my lifetime. That led me to a job as an organism engineer at Microbia, where I was then able to learn how to validate strain performance in a bioreactor. Learning fermentation changed by entire vision: I felt like it was my calling!

I love fermentation – it’s at the crossroads of science and engineering: you need to understand both the microbial physiology and the physical nature of the environment – the heat transfer, the mass transfer. That was really exciting. I was working in an area that combines two areas I really love, and working on a process that produced something really impactful in a renewable way. As I learned more about the industry, I realized how many products in our everyday lives are produced from fermentation as a manufacturing process – it blew my mind. And helped me realize the impact I could have with this technology.

I’ve been at Ginkgo for about three years. We’re developing interesting products, but more importantly, we’re perfecting this high-throughput automated technology that will enable us to more efficiently and effectively solve the world’s problems…while doing a bunch of fun stuff in the meantime! If we’re doing it right, we’re building a system that will be hugely impactful.

Tell us a little about your role –  what’s the high-level impact you have on Ginkgo?

Three years ago Ginkgo was “the organism company,” and I was brought on to build out the fermentation team so that we could also provide our customers with industrially relevant fermentation processes for the organisms we were engineering. My first project was our first commercial product with Robertet.

Now we have an amazing lab-scale setup that I’m really proud of, an awesome team, and about 15 projects being actively worked on by the fermentation team– it’s a team that’s really scaled with Ginkgo.  The success of projects we worked on in fermentation meant that I got a crash course in everything from regulatory to safety and supply chain management.

As we moved our first product toward commercial scale, it became evident that it would benefit Ginkgo and our customers if we had the internal capability to also manage commercial production when that option makes sense for Ginkgo and our customers. So, last summer I transitioned from fermentation to deployment. In the foundry, we have awesome tools that take care of R&D, but once you have your strain and fermentation process developed, there are a lot of tools we need to take that to a contract manufacturer, ensure we can scale it up, meet our cost goals and product spec, etc. So deployment is where we break away from the foundry model and make it commercializable.

Before I came to Ginkgo I didn’t think fermentation could be done in high throughput. But now we’ve validated some really amazing technology that can increase the throughput of each fermentation engineer four to six times. Based on our success in fermentation, I’m optimistic we can also find ways to carry some of the foundry efficiencies downstream into the deployment functions, too.

Walk us through a typical day in the lab/your role

A lot of meetings! Right now, I’m working with a contract manufacturer to install additional downstream capacity. We are able to run 50,000 liter fermentations and purify crude product, but don’t currently have the capacity installed to purify the final product. So I spent today discussing the capital installation at our contract manufacturer, reviewing timelines, managing resources, and then had lunch with one of my best friends who also happens to work at Ginkgo! Then I worked on performance reviews, met with some other project leads, and had a meeting about shipping safety requirements.

What’s the most exciting thing Ginkgo is doing?

I have kids, so I think about how I can contribute to making the world a better place for them and future generations. I’d love to make products that are renewable, sustainable, and biodegradable.

I get really excited about Ginkgo in general. We’re taking things to the next level! This technology — biology — can provide so much more for humanity than we currently utilize. Joyn Bio is Ginkgo’s first major venture that could impact our use of fossil fuels and overall health of the plant. I’m not directly involved in Joyn, but it’s a huge dream and if anyone is going to deliver on it, we have the best chance of success. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

 

Ena Cratsenburg is the Chief Business Officer at Ginkgo Bioworks and has more than a decade of experience working in the industry with companies like Amyris, Evolva, Intrexon and Pixar. Get to know Ena a little better and learn more about her role at Ginkgo:

1. Can you tell us about your career journey and how you went from Pixar to the biotech industry?
I spent six years at Pixar overseeing the Disney/Pixar collaboration and doing deals that would maximize the value of Pixar’s intellectual properties. When I joined Pixar in ‘99, they had just signed the Co-development Agreement with Disney (which was essentially a 50/50 partnership), and I was responsible for making sure the agreement was implemented properly which included ensuring Pixar properties were monetized in the market to the fullest extent. For example, I was actively involved with Disney’s television team to determine the best way to license the Pixar films for television distribution across geographies and different distribution windows (e.g. PPV, cable, network, etc.). In addition to the Disney agreement, Pixar carved out rights to exploit its IP in interactive games. As the only business person on the team at the time when I joined Pixar, I also worked on the deals related to licensing of the Pixar properties to interactive gaming companies.

Surprising as it may sound, this was the perfect training ground for me to make an entrance to the biotech world at Amyris, Evolva, Intrexon and now Ginkgo. It laid the foundation for understanding how to commercialize emerging technologies and identify market opportunities. I had always been attracted to synthetic biology for its potential to revolutionize technology and was excited to join the industry to help companies recognize the power of microorganisms and find a competitive edge within biology.

2. Why Ginkgo?
The two main drivers for my move to Ginkgo were the technology and the team. Ginkgo’s technology is infinitely scalable and Ginkgo’s incorporation of automation into its foundry expands the universe of what is possible with synthetic biology. Furthermore, Ginkgo’s technology and foundry model make engineering biology far more economically sound – something that’s always top of mind for me on the business development side. The team at Ginkgo is incredibly smart and it’s exciting to work amongst such a talented team. Beyond just the technology and high-quality deal flow the team is bringing in, I’ve noticed how well everyone articulates Ginkgo’s mission and value proposition. I can’t imagine a better team.

3. What does your role entail at Ginkgo?
I oversee business development at Ginkgo, working closely with our customers, partners and prospects to help them identify new ways to leverage synthetic biology in their line of business. My focus has always been on commercializing emerging technologies, and at Ginkgo that means helping companies understand the greater potential of synthetic biology whether that means finding ways we can utilize biology as a platform for new product development, supporting production and cost efficiencies, or promoting sustainability. As far as day-to-day, there is really no standard day for me. I could be developing new value propositions, meeting with customers (either via telephone or in person), furthering various stages of our pipeline, or negotiating/evaluating deals. I also work closely with the business development team to provide guidance and support as needed.

4. Can you discuss your experience working in the consumer sector as it relates to synthetic biology?
I led the consumer sector at Intrexon and was responsible for identifying opportunities to connect consumer-oriented companies with Intrexon’s existing technologies. Between my time at Intrexon and now with this role at Ginkgo, I’m thinking more critically than ever about how synthetic biology can impact consumer goods outside of just ingredients, chemicals or biofuels (which have been the focus of synthetic biology companies thus far). Ginkgo’s technology allows me take a step back and look broadly at the societal, economic and environmental impact that synthetic biology can have on products that consumers engage with every day like cosmetics, fermented foods, wearable devices, clothing and more. These are areas that synthetic biology has only now begun to explore.

5. What is your favorite thing about working at Ginkgo?
Hmmm, I actually have two things. The first is that I love the “swing for the fences” mentality. I truly believe that in order to do big and impactful things, we have to think big and be willing to take the risks. Ginkgo embraces that and I love how this mentality is woven into the company’s DNA. The second thing is the commitment and dedication of the team – we have incredibly talented and smart folks here, and when we combine that with commitment and dedication, we are unstoppable!