Caroline Ajo-Franklin has been a Staff Scientist at LBNL’s Molecular Foundry since 2007. Before that, she received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University with Prof. Steve Boxer and was a post-doctoral fellow working on synthetic biology with Prof. Pam Silver at Harvard Medical School. She is enthralled by the incredible, diverse functionality of biological molecules and assemblies and seek to engineer these complexes and their host organisms to address global challenges in energy and the environment.
Research
We are a research group at Berkeley Lab in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus. We use biophysics and synthetic biology to engineer and explore the nanoscale interface between living microbes and inorganic materials. We are particularly interested in the basic mechanisms underlying charge transfer and assembly of materials at this living/non-living interface. Ultimately, our research has applications in carbon capture and sequestration, bio-solar energy generation, and hierarchical assembly of nanostructures.
Our lab is part of the Molecular Foundry, a Nanoscience User Facility which provides outside researchers (“Users”) with the instrumentation, in-house expertise and multidisciplinary environment necessary to pursue research that can benefit from or contribute to nanoscience.
For more information, visit her website: http://cafgroup.lbl.gov/