Dr. Ophelia Venturelli is an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry, Chemical & Biological Engineering and Biochemistry at UW-Madison. The Venturelli lab aims to understand and engineer microbiomes using systems and synthetic biology for applications in human health, agriculture and bioprocessing. Dr. Venturelli began her appointment in 2016 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 the Shaw Scientist Award (2017), Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (2017), NIH Outstanding Investigator Award (2017) and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Innovation Award (2019).