Biography

James is an Associate Professor and member of the Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute (MolES) and Center for Synthetic Biology (CSB) at the University of Washington.

Previously, James was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist with Jay D. Keasling at UC Berkeley and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute. There, he developed design-driven approaches to engineer RNA-based genetic control devices for programming quantitatively-predictable functions in synthetic biological systems. James was a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. with Jack W. Szostak. As a graduate student, he used information theory, in vitro selection, RNA biochemisty and 3D solution NMR to show that there may be a fundamental, quantitative relationship between the informational complexities of molecular structures and the functional activities they can perform. James has a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale. He has received the University of Washington Presidential Innovation Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Education

• Ph.D., Harvard University, Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, 2005
• B.S., Yale University, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, 1998

Previous appointments

• University of California, Berkeley, Jane Coffin Childs Research Fellow, 2006-2009

Research Statement

The Carothers Research Group integrates quantitative RNA device design, dynamic control system modeling, and CRISPR-Cas network engineering for applications in synthetic biology.  Our aims are to understand fundamental biological design principles and to engineer systems to meet demands for new sources of industrially- and medically-important chemicals and materials.

Honors & awards

• UW College of Engineering Junior Faculty Award, 2016
• Emerging Scholar, 2016, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
• UW Presidential Innovation Award, 2014
• Sloan Research Fellow, Computational Molecular Biology, 2013, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

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