A gene-therapy scientist and founder developing HarborSite's recombinase platform.

I'm the co-founder and CSO of HarborSite, a genome-engineering company turning site-specific recombinases into durable, one-time gene therapies. We engineer these compact enzymes to insert full-length genes into genomic safe harbors. I established our laboratory at LabCentral and direct the company's research.

Most gene therapies either add DNA that fades or edit one base at a time. Recombinases work differently. They cut and paste whole genes into a chosen spot in the genome, cleanly and in a single step. Natural recombinases are picky about where they land, so we engineer them to read new addresses and place a full-length gene in a genomic safe harbor, once, for the life of the cell.

Before HarborSite, I built and led a gene-editing origination team at Tessera Therapeutics, mining and characterizing over a thousand mobile genetic elements as new tools for writing DNA. As a postdoctoral fellow in George Church's laboratory at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute, I engineered new recombinases and a multi-AAV strategy for delivering genes beyond the natural size limit of viral vectors, the work that became HarborSite. I completed my doctorate in Wilson Wong's laboratory at Boston University, engineering large-scale genetic circuits in mammalian cells, published in Nature Biotechnology. The thread across all of it is the same, finding better ways to write genes into a genome and control them once they are there.

My work spans the experiments and the analysis behind them. I design and run the screens that advance our recombinases toward new targets, together with the computational work they require, the bioinformatics and the machine-learning models we train on our deep mutational scans to predict how recombinases read DNA. I also write scientific software, some of which the laboratory now uses. I am drawn to a problem as much by the question inside it as by the result.

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