James Carothers, PhD, is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and adjunct assistant professor of bioengineering at the Univ. of Washington. His research focus is in the area of fundamental and applied synthetic biology, including RNA engineering and genetic control system design. He has a BS in biology from Yale Univ. and a PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Univ. He was a Jane Coffin Childs Research Fellow at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.