Rachel Wellhausen (’00), a Ph.D. candidate in political science in MIT’s Program on Emerging Technologies (PoET), was crowned the top new poli-sci student at the university last year.
Now she’s working on a National Science Foundation project with SynBERC, the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, a multi-institution research effort to lay the groundwork for synthetic biology.
Lest you start having nightmares about vampire bunnies crossed with Richard Preston, know that Rachel’s team is assigned to figure out the social and ethical implications of the new technology.