Team UOregon

Team UOregon is based out of the Plesa lab at the Univeristy of Oregon's Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Our group focuses on developing high-throughput technologies to characterize sequence space, and we are interested in leveraging directed evolution as a strategy to explore natural adaptation and engineer proteins.

Team Lead

Nora Kearns

Nora joined the Plesa Lab as an undergraduate in 2019, and since then has worked on a variety of projects, both experimental and computational. She is is now an MSc student in the Bioinformatics and Genomics Master's Program, and her research interests include synthetic biology, bioinformatics, and DNA nanotechnology. Nora started the UOregon iDEC team with Dr. Plesa because she is excited about leveraging directed evolution as a strategy to engineer complex proteins.

Team Player

Amanda Kreppel

Amanda joined the Plesa Lab January of 2021 as an undergraduate having little knowledge in Synthetic Biology. Learning new hands on protocols and utilizing E. coli for recombinant gene expression has deeply increased her passion for science. Her research interests also include microbiology and she plans on taking a gap year after she graduates in 2022 before pursuing a masters in biotechnology. Amanda's interest in the Plesa lab’s novel approach to directed evolution drew her to joining the iDEC team.

Principal Investigator

Calin Plesa

Calin Plesa is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon's Knight Campus. His research interests include biochemistry, synthetic biology, molecular biology, microbiology, structural biology, genetics, bioinformatics, and quantitative biology. Work in the Plesa lab focuses specifically on large-scale gene synthesis and high-throughput methods to characterize and engineer biological protein-based systems.