Karl Barber

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT KARL BARBER

The overarching goal of my career is to apply my cross-disciplinary expertise in engineering and biology to create new biomolecular tools with broad research applications. As an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I majored in Chemical Engineering and French, graduating summa cum laude in 2012. I then carried out research as a Fulbright Student Scholar in Genetics at McGill University under Dr. Roderick McInnes, where I began to incorporate biomedical concepts into my scientific interests. I subsequently began my Ph.D. studies at Yale University in 2013 under the mentorship of Dr. Jesse Rinehart. There, as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, I designed and optimized a platform to genetically encode a modified amino acid (phosphoserine) in bacterial proteins. This platform enables the large-scale production and interrogation of proteins harboring this human disease-relevant modification (phosphorylation) that is normally inaccessible in E. coli. Since 2015, I have published 6 first or co-first author research publications, 8 middle author publications, 2 perspective pieces, and 1 textbook chapter.In 2018, I joined Dr. Stephen Elledge’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where I was selected as an inaugural Schmidt Science Fellow and Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research Fellow. There, I integrated engineering and biological concepts to develop a CRISPR-based peptide display platform, the subject of a first-author 2021 paper in Molecular Cell.