Dr. Ophelia Venturelli is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. The Venturelli lab aims to understand and engineer microbiomes using systems and synthetic biology for applications spanning human health, agriculture and bioprocessing. Dr. Venturelli began as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison in Biochemistry after completing a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of Dr. Adam P. Arkin. Dr. Venturelli’s postdoctoral research focused on developing data-driven methods to decipher microbial interactions shaping assembly of synthetic human gut microbiomes and strategies to manipulate intracellular resource allocation by exploiting tools from synthetic biology. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics in 2013 from Caltech with Richard M. Murray, where she studied single-cell dynamics and the role of feedback loops in a metabolic gene regulatory network. Dr. Venturelli received numerous awards including Shaw Scientist Award (2017), Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (2017), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Innovation Award (2019), OVCRGE Early Career Innovator Award (2023), ACS Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award (2023) and the Duke University Thomas Langford Lectureship Award (2024).