Erika is known for her pioneering work in synthetic biology and evolutionary engineering. She is the CEO of Pioneer Labs, a startup engineering life for Mars. She previously led an academic research group at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where her team used robotics-accelerated evolution to advance biotechnology for both Earth and space applications. Erika also founded The Align Foundation, a nonprofit on a mission to make it easer for life scientists to share methods and data so that AI can accelerate discovery.
Erika has a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from Caltech, with research experience at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, D. E. Shaw Research and Sandia National Laboratories. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship in David Baker’s lab, focusing on machine learning for protein design. Her achievements have been recognized with honors such as the Intel Science Talent Search first prize and the Davidson Fellowship. Through her leadership and research, Erika is shaping the future of bioengineering and scientific discovery
