Dr. Jusiak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California Irvine. Her lab has two major focus areas: programming macrophages with synthetic gene circuits against cancer and using the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as a model system for cancer-host interactions. She earned her PhD in Developmental Biology from Dr. Graeme Mardon’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where she studied transcriptional regulation of eye development in Drosophila larvae. Toward the end of her graduate studies, she became fascinated with the field of synthetic biology, and she decided to switch fields. Dr. Jusiak became a postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Timothy Lu in the Syntetic Biology Center at MIT, where she entered a completely new world of mammalian cell culture and synthetic circuit design. She worked on several projects, including synthetic circuits for detecting endoplasmic reticulum stress and optimizing antibody production in CHO cells. Her start at UCI was delayed because of the pandemic, so before arriving at UCI, she worked nine months in the laboratory of Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, where she built tools for independent regulation of two genes simultaneously in Drosophila. Now, in her lab at UCI, Dr. Jusiak brings together her experience in Drosophila genetics and in mammalian cell biology around the theme of synthetic biology in cancer and cancer-host interactions. Dr. Jusiak is an associate member of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Center for Complex Biological Systems, the Center for Synthetic Biology, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.