Cynthia H. Collins

Biography

Cynthia Collins joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer in March 2008 as an assistant professor. Cynthia grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She obtained her Honours B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Toronto in 2000, and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Caltech in 2006. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Michael Surette's lab at the University of Calgary, where she was the recipient of a prestigious Alberta Ingenuity Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Communities of microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and play important roles in processes that directly impact human life, from environmental remediation, wastewater treatment and assistance in food digestion to biofouling, biofilm-related corrosion and hospital-acquired infections. The Collins Lab focuses on fundamental and applied aspects of microbial consortia and combines multiscale modeling of biological networks (from gene to protein to organism to community), metabolic and biochemical engineering, synthetic biology and engineered cell-cell communication with the complexities of coexisting communities of bacteria

Research Interest

Synthetic Biology, Biochemical Engineering, Microbial Communities