Markita P. Landry, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (Email: landry@berkeley.edu). She received a BS in chemistry and a BA in physics from the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a PhD in chemical physics from the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, she has held interim research positions at the Biophysics Institute at the Technical Univ. of Munich and at the Center for Nanobiosciences at Osaka Univ. Her current research focuses on the development of synthetic infrared molecular sensors. Her group develops synthetic biomimetic nanocomposites to impart control over nanomaterial interactions with biological systems for two applications: to exploit the intrinsic nanomaterial infrared fluorescence for molecular imaging, and to exploit the highly tunable chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials for targeted delivery of biological cargoes to plants. She is a recent recipient of early career awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and is a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator.