Green Science & Sustainability Series: Industry Research & Product Development

Monday, October 12th, 5:30-6:30 PM CST

This week’s What can I do with my PhD? career seminar will feature three scientists working in biotechnology companies that focus on creating innovative and sustainable products. They will share their career journeys, their driving principles, and what they love about working in green industry.

Innu Chaudhary

Scientist, Impossible Foods

Dr. Innu Chaudhary received her PhD in Biological Systems Engineering from Washington State University in 2017. She’s been working with Impossible Foods’s Downstream Isolation R&D team for 3 years and focuses on developing new technologies for protein process development and scale-up. She is a Scientist and technical lead on projects, working cross-functionally with various R&D teams and manufacturing for Leghemoglobin protein.

Harry McNamara

Co-Founder and CSO, C16 Biosciences

Dr. Harry McNamara is Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at C16 Biosciences, Inc. C16 uses microbiology and synthetic biology to provide sustainable alternatives to palm oil. Harry and his co-founders (Shara Ticku and David Heller) started C16 Biosciences to solve an urgent challenge in environmental sustainability which cannot be addressed with conventional agriculture. C16 is currently based in New York City, and is backed by investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Y Combinator.

Before (and overlapping with) founding C16, Harry earned his PhD in Physics at Harvard. He conducted his thesis research with Prof. Adam Cohen, where he used optogenetics to study biological pattern formation in both synthetic tissues and in the developing embryo. During his PhD, he was also part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics. Before coming to Harvard, Harry was a Mitchell Scholar at Trinity College Dublin and at Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He earned his BA at Yale, where he majored in Ethics, Politics, and Economics; and in Physics. Before starting graduate school, he also spent a year working at Butterfly Network, a biomedical imaging startup.

Jennie Tung

Senior Scientist, Memphis Meats

Jennie is a cell and molecular biologist with 10+ years of experience in vertebrate cell culture operations, including industry experience cultivating fish cell cultures for the purpose of meat production.