Will Owens Email & Phone Number

Biology PhD student working at MIT / the Broad Institute. My current thesis work involves some cocktail of immunology, microbiology, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology. I'm not actively looking for a job, but easily lured in by high-impact projects and exciting ideas. Website and contact info here: https://ovvens.comAs a National Merit Scholar, I received my undergraduate education at the University of Florida. There, I received a B.S. in Computer Science (4.0, cum laude) and a B.S. in Microbiology (4.0, summa cum laude). I was named a Goldwater Scholar in 2019 for demonstrating "the greatest potential to become a leader" in my respective field. Out of a graduating class of roughly 9,000 UF students, he was one of nine named a Four-Year Outstanding Scholar.During my time at UF, I pursued research in the Kladde Lab, an epigenomics lab that explores how large-scale patterns in methylation and chromatin accessibility relate to oncogenesis and chemoresistance. I split my time between high-throughput bioninformatics on the University supercomputer (probably what made me a Linux geek) and long stints of mammalian cell culture. For my undergraduate thesis project, I used CRISPR/cas9 to probe a possible regulatory region for a mismatch-repair gene and an associated proposed biomarker for colon cancer.Also at UF, I was a founding member on the iGEM UFlorida 2018 team, where I helped produce a recombinant probiotic capable of delivering butyrate to the gut I was awarded a grant from the University Scholar's Program to pursue my portion of the project. This project exposed me to the techniques of molecular cloning and led me to discover my passion for synthetic biology.After undergrad, I moved to the Bay Area to join Octant, a drug-discovery startup. As a Research Associate on Octant's Synthetic Biology team, I learned the "full stack" of synthetic biology: from assembling plasmids to engineering cell lines and from assay optimization to data analysis. Octant infected me with the startup bug, and I can't wait to jump back into this game after graduate school.