MIT World Speakers

Reshma Shetty PhD '08

Reshma Shetty earned her MIT Ph.D. in Biological Engineering, where she engineered bacteria to smell like mint and banana. She has been active in the field for several years and co-organized SB1.0, the first international conference in synthetic biology in 2004. She spearheaded the use of OpenWetWare, a wiki for life science researchers, as an educational tool when she helped teach an MIT undergraduate laboratory course in synthetic biology in 2006. The course demonstrated how wiki’s can support university education and has served as a model for courses from institutions across the country. She also engineered bacteria to smell like mint and banana’s. Now she and four other MITers have founded a new synthetic biology startup called Ginkgo BioWorks.