Dr. Evan Appleton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School in the Church Lab in the Department of Genetics. He completed his doctorate at Boston University in the Bioinformatics Program. His thesis work focused on building computer-aided design tools for synthetic biology workflows. Dr. Appleton’s current research interests include developmental biology, biosecurity, synthetic biology, and computer-aided design. In the Church Lab, he leads a project for synthetic-biology based shape formation of multicellular masses and a project for identifying potential toxin-creating DNA sequences. In addition to his technical work, he is engaged with the broader biosecurity community and was a Fellow in the 2018 class of the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity (ELBI) Program.