Kettner Griswold

Background

About Kettner Griswold

Kettner Griswold Jr. is a Hertz-Draper Graduate Research Fellow at the George Church Lab at Harvard Medical School, and the Edward Boyden Lab at MIT. His current work focuses on library-on-library protein interaction profiling and evolution strategies. As a Hertz Fellow, he is pursuing his PhD at the MIT Media Lab under the joint guidance of George Church and Ed Boyden. Kettner was named an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Fellow in 2015 by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and advises the US government on dual use issues in Synthetic Biology. As a Draper Fellow at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, he is developing novel technologies to address problems in the field. In his sophomore year at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Kettner and his roommate Paul Sebexen were awarded Thiel Fellowships, and left Georgia Tech to co-found Evolutionary Solutions, a biotechnology startup developing a novel DNA synthesis technology for rapid, cheap development cycles in synthetic biology. During the Thiel Fellowship, Kettner was a research affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where most of the technology development for Evolutionary Solutions was performed. Prior to leaving Georgia Tech, Kettner was a material science and engineering major, with a biomaterials concentration. While at Georgia Tech, he led an iGEM team in 2011 developing a conjugating CRISPR-CAS plasmid as a strategy to counter antimicrobial resistance. Prior to college, he performed independent research within the J. Craig Venter Institute's Synthetic Biology department under the mentorship of Michael Montague.