Karmella Haynes

Karmella Haynes earned her Ph.D. studying Drosophila chromatin epigenetics at Washington University, St. Louis. Postdoctoral fellowships at Davidson College and Harvard introduced her to synthetic biology. Today, her research applies the intrinsic properties of chromatin to engineer proteins that control cell development. After Dr. Haynes joined the faculty at the Emory School of Medicine in 2019, she received an NIH R21 grant (2019) to develop new protein engineering and computational tools for cancer epigenetics, and launched the annual NSF-funded AfroBiotech conference. She is a founder and instructor of the Cold Spring Harbor Summer Course on Synthetic Biology, a member of the national Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC), and Advisor and Judge Emeritus for the annual International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. She has been a featured guest on PBS NOVA (2020) and PRI’s Science Friday (2016), and her work has been profiled in Forbes magazine (2020).