Biomolecular Materials Initiative Lead
Blaby-Haas joined the JGI in 2022 as lead of the Biomolecular Materials Initiative, a partnership between JGI and the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscale research and knowledge-based user facility at Berkeley lab. She earned her PhD in Microbiology and Cell Science in 2011 from the University of Florida, working with Valérie de Crécy-Lagard on using comparative genomics to predict gene function in bacteria and leveraging molecular biology and reverse genetics to test those hypotheses. From 2011 – 2015, she worked with Sabeeha Merchant at UCLA as a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellow, expanding her experimental repertoire to include in vitro protein-based techniques, algae, and plants, while focusing on understanding the evolution and function of proteins involved in metal homeostasis. She began her independent research career at Brookhaven National Laboratory (2015) where she co-founded and led the Quantitative Plant Science Initiative (2017-2022), a BER Science Focus Area (SFA). In 2022, she joined LBNL to spearhead the development of a joint user capability between the JGI and Molecular Foundry for genome-encoded biomaterial discovery, design, and engineering.
