Congratulations to Taryn Imamura for being named one of the three 2026 Lawrence Fellows from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Taryn will begin her 3-year fellowship this Fall at LLNL, and we look forward to her continued work at the intersection of robotics, materials and bioengineering!
Congrats to undergrads Shriya Sivakumar, Vanessa Wu and Ivy Zhen for their poster presentations at the 2026 Meeting of the Minds! Here are the poster titles:
Shriya presented "Modular DNA Origami Design for Staple Conservation"
Vanessa presented "Simulation-Guided Design of Tetrahedral Framework Nucleic Acid for Enhanced Mechanical Stability"
Ivy presented "Investigating Local and Bulk Condensate Properties of Novel DNA Nanostar Geometries"
Congrats to undergraduate Nicholas Chung on being awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
Congratulations to Isabella Ferranti for winning the Mary Jane and Milton C. Shaw Graduate Fellowship in Mechanical Engineering! Hooray, Isabella!
Congratulations to Sebastian Arias on the publication of his article "Engineering non-linear mechanical advantage in DNA nanostructures: a wireframe adaptation of a lamina emergent mechanism"!
We're delighted to have five fantastic new lab members! Tush and Srija are exploring the yield of formation and morphology of novel modular and generatively-design DNA origami. Ivy and Vanessa are undergraduates, who are exploring the nanoscale and microscale system properties of two different PNA-DNA tile-based systems. And Praneetha is a postdoctoral researcher, who has joined our ARPA-H POSEIDON project team. Welcome to the lab!
On December 4th, Prof. Taylor presented the lab research vision for nanomachines at bio- and electronic interfaces at the Carnegie Mellon University CMU125: Power of Possibilities Tour NYC.
Shoutouts to fellow presenters Prof. Simon DeDeo and Prof. Laurence Ales for their inspiring and thoughtful visions of the challenges and opportunities for innovation in this new age of AI.
It was also amazing to connect with so many amazing Carnegie Mellon alumni in NYC!
Elsa's paper "MoleculeCrafter and Noncanonical Base Pairing: A Semiautomated CAD Tool for Creating Flexible and Unitized 3D Printable Macromolecules for Education"" was published in the Journal of Chemical Education.
Congratulations to Elsa for demonstrating a novel use of semiautomated CAD tools to give the educational community a new and powerful modelmaking tool! This rapid and easy to use pipeline expands the accessibilitiy 3D printed models of nucleic acid structures and nanotechnology.
We are now recruiting for the Prism Science Initiative ! Join us!
Honored and thrilled to represent the team as PI for this ARPA-H POSEIDON project, which brings together phenomenal researchers across academia and industry. We come from CMU engineering, Ginkgo Bioworks, the University of Pittsburgh, Platypus Bio NZ, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, KU Leuven, and Velentium Medical.
In this ambitious project we aim to tackle one of the grand challenges in cancer medicine, the early detection of stage 1 tumors, with the aim of making cancer detection affordable and convenient for everyone! Read the CMU press release here.