Emma J Chory, Ph.D.

Dr. Emma Chory an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University and her M.S. & Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

Her interest in epigenetics began while working with Dr. James Bradner at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she developed inhibitors of histone-modifying proteins implicated in Mixed Lineage Leukemia. As a graduate student with Dr. Gerald Crabtree at Stanford, she studied chromatin remodeling complexes and used synthetic biology in mammalian stem cells, coupled with first-principle simulations to uncover how nucleosome turnover establishes cell fate and becomes dysregulated in cancer.

During her postdoctoral research with Dr. Kevin Esvelt and Dr. Jim Collins at MIT, she developed systems that combined continuous evolution with custom robotics to enable high-throughput, systematic, and quantitative studies of protein function.

At Duke, her lab uses a combination of synthetic biology, chemical biology, first principles, robotics, and sequence-to-function approaches to generate new tools for understanding molecular biology and developing next-generation therapeutics.