Karmella Haynes

Haynes is originally from St. Louis.[1] She attended Florida A&M University, graduating in 1999 with a bachelor's degree in biology.[2] She then attended Washington University in St. Louis for her postgraduate studies, working with Sarah Elgin on DNA and gene expression. In 2006 she received her Ph.D in molecular genetics from the University.[2] She spent her summers working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3]

Haynes completed postdoctoral fellowships at Davidson College, in 2008, and Harvard Medical School in 2011.[2] While at Davidson College as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow, Haynes won publication of the year from the Journal of Biological Engineering for her article on modifying E. coli bacteria to perform a computational calculation.[4][5][6][7] At Davidson College, Haynes redesigned the undergraduate bioinformatics teaching course.[8] At Harvard Medical School Haynes worked in the laboratory of Pamela Silver, combining chromatin dynamics and synthetic biology.[3][9]

In 2011 Haynes was appointed to Arizona State University.[10][11] Since joining Arizona State University, Haynes has been the faculty advisor for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition.[12] She was awarded a K01 grant in 2015, to study the use of modular peptide motifs to build synthetic chromatin proteins that activate dormant therapeutic genes.[13] She hopes to increase the use of technology in therapeutics, working on tissue regeneration and customisable protein-based drugs.[14] By engineering genes and proteins, the Haynes group create epigenetic machinery that can regulate DNA.[15] The proteins themselves are fusion transcription factors, which can target particular genes.[16]

In 2018, Haynes moved to the W.H. Coulter Biomedical Engineering Department at Georgia Tech/Emory University.

Haynes has appeared on PBS, talking about biotechnology and disease.[17] Alongside research, Haynes is an accomplished artist.[18][19] In 2011 she painted her poster presentation for the annual Synthetic biology conference.[20] Her artwork is still on the walls at Harvard University.[3] She is a member of the Building with Biology public engagement project.[21] She has been featured twice on Science Friday.[22]