10 Facts About Christina Agapakis

Christina Agapakis is the former Creative Director of the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks.

Christina Agapakis then attended Harvard University, where she received her PhD in biological and biomedical sciences under the mentorship of Pamela Silver.

Christina Agapakis worked to engineer photosynthetic bacteria to invade animal cells, essentially giving animals cells chloroplasts, and engineered bacteria to produce hydrogen fuel.

Christina Agapakis's thesis covers a range of work she pursued during her doctoral career, including mentoring a Harvard IGEM competition team in 2010, which developed an open source toolkit for plant engineering known as the Harvard iGarden.

Christina Agapakis discussed a project called "Selfmade" at the intersection of science and art, which focused on the microbial ecology of cheese and the human body.

Christina Agapakis has been leading the company's 100 Vial Project, which is engineering a library of bio-based scents.

Christina Agapakis began blogging in graduate school and in 2011 started a column for Scientific American called the "Oscillator," sharing her thoughts on the latest developments in the field of synthetic biology for a popular audience.

Christina Agapakis's posts covered a number of topics from sustainability to the intersection between art and science to the microbiology of body fluids.

Christina Agapakis has written for a variety of outlets, including highlighting the women who made microbiology possible for Popular Science and reviewing Sophia Roosth's book Synthetic: How life got made for New Scientist.

Christina Agapakis co-founded a four-edition print science magazine called Method Quarterly about how science works in practice with science writers Azeen Ghorayshi and Rose Eveleth.