Joe Levine Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Greater Los Angeles Area

Technical consulting engagements with public and private clients.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Microbial synthetic biology to improve 21st century agriculture. As founding CEO I raised $400k in pre-seed funding from institutional and angel investors.

Los Angeles, Ca

Lead for several R&D projects in food, agriculture, and nutrition for human health. Responsibilities included:- developing & managing external academic, NGO, and CRO R&D projects and relationships- developing external strategic industrial partnerships to support long term product innovation- performing biostatistical analysis (Python/STATA) & manuscript writeup of research results

Santa Monica, Ca

Quantitative empirical research on US public equities.

Pasadena, Ca

My PhD research in systems biology studied how genes enable complex cellular behaviors, by working together in “circuits” or “networks.” This discipline bridges a molecular description of living matter (DNA, protein, etc) with a behavioral description of living organisms (such as how cells respond to external stimuli). Specifically, my thesis discovered and characterized a novel type of cellular “timing” behavior, working with the sporulation initiation response of the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis. When threatened by sudden environmental stress, B. subtilis can protect itself by transforming into a hardy, dormant spore. I demonstrated that B. subtilis can postpone this transformation until after multiple rounds of cell division. This enables a final burst of population expansion before dormancy, during which the population can explore multiple, potentially beneficial alternative cell fates. The timer controlling this delay arises from pulsed feedback interactions between genes in the sporulation initiation circuit. Two key takeaways emerged from my PhD. (1) New understanding of circuit mechanisms behind cellular timers. Before this, cell-autonomous timers were rarely recognized (especially in microbes) and their molecular mechanisms were unclear. (2) Appreciation that gene regulation is highly dynamic. My work shows how pulsed gene regulation can enable complex cellular behaviors, here via a novel dynamic circuit design we named "polyphasic feedback."This work utilized a multidisciplinary toolkit:- experimental : automated time lapse fluorescent microscopy, microbiology, genetic engineering, biophysics, microfluidics (1um scale)- computational : automated time lapse image analysis (object segmentation and tracking), time series analysis (filtering, event-detection, time series on binary lineage trees)- mathematical: analytic & computational investigation of nonlinear dynamical systemsPlease see publications for further details.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computation And Neural Systems

Activities and Societies: International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition - Caltech team captain. Neuromorphic.

Master Of Engineering (M.Eng.), Electrical Engineering

Master's of Engineering thesis titled "Friction Effects on Network Mechanisms of Short Term Memory." Award - Guillemin Prize for best.

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Mathematics, Electrical Engineering

Activities and Societies: UROP, 6.270 Autonomous Robotics Design Competition, Phi Kappa Theta.