Overview
Emma Chory is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She received her B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University and her doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. She became interested in epigenetics when she worked with Dr. James Bradner at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute developing inhibitors of histone-modifying proteins that cause Mixed Lineage Leukemia. As a PhD student at Stanford, she worked with Gerald Crabtree studying chromatin remodeling complexes, and used synthetic biology in mammalian stem cells to discover how nucleosome turnover establishes cell fate and is mis-regualted in cancer. As postdoctoral fellow with Kevin Esvelt and Jim Collins at MIT, she developed novel systems to enable the high-throughput, systematic, and quantitative evolution of therapeutic proteins and cellular populations using automation and directed evolution.