Nina Donghia

I am a scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, where I have been for over 11 years, with over 17 years total in my field. My main expertise is in vivo mouse modeling of human disorders, diseases, and conditions, which I do for members of my team who are overarchingly looking at or developing applications of synthetic biology and biotech-related projects. The projects I'm working on are always changing, and I'm learning new things constantly. That can either be the propagation of different microbial strains that both my colleagues and I are engineering to have either therapeutic or environmental advantages that could be used to solve some of the most pressing problems facing mankind at the moment. Or that could also be learning new mouse models, how to model different various conditions on the fly to assist in validating my teammates' applications of synthetic biology, where they may be developing things such as novel antibiotic compounds to use in current pathogens that are resistant to all known antibiotics. What my typical workload looks like is always changing and evolving, which is great for me because it's not very static. Before Harvard, I worked for 6 years at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, the very place where, around 100 years ago, they first pioneered using mice as model organisms for our human pathologies. I worked there doing research and basically got an official PhD doing that, though I don't have a higher degree. That position led me to my current position at Harvard.