As a
Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow, she completed her first postdoctoral fellowship in teaching at
Davidson College under the guidance of
Laurie Heyer and Malcolm Campbell.[4][5] During her time as a fellow, Haynes redesigned the undergraduate
bioinformatics teaching course and won publication of the year from the Journal of Biological Engineering for her article Engineering bacteria to solve the Burnt Pancake Problem.[13][14][15][16][17] She was introduced to
synthetic biology and became a member of Davidson's 2006
iGEM team.[18]
Haynes went on to complete a second postdoctoral fellowship in
Pamela Silver's lab at
Harvard Medical School where she leveraged her experience with chromatin dynamics and synthetic biology to create artificial transcription factors which activated genes based on
histone methylation.[6][19][12]
Academic career and research
After her postdoctoral fellowships in 2011, Haynes started her lab in the
School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at
Arizona State University (ASU).[20][21] There, her lab focused on creating epigenetic machinery that can regulate DNA.[22] The proteins themselves are fusion transcription factors, which can target particular genes.[23] She hopes to increase the use of technology in therapeutics, working on tissue regeneration and customizable protein-based drugs.[24] In 2015 she was awarded a K01 grant to study the use of modular peptide motifs to build synthetic chromatin proteins that activate dormant therapeutic genes.[25] During her time at ASU, she was the faculty advisor for the ASU
iGEM team.[26]
In 2018, Haynes moved to the W.H. Coulter Biomedical Engineering Department at
Georgia Tech/
Emory University.[27][5] During her time here, she founded the AfroBiotech conference and the
Cold Spring Harbor Summer Course on Synthetic Biology.[28][29] She was on the responsible conduct committee for IGEM in 2018 and 2019.[30][31]
Public engagement
Haynes has appeared on
PBS, talking about biotechnology and disease.[32] Alongside research, Haynes is an accomplished artist.[33][34] In 2011, she painted her poster presentation for the Fifth International Meeting of Synthetic Biology (SB5.0) conference.[35] Her artwork is still on the walls at
Harvard University.[6] She is a member of the Building with Biology public engagement project.[36] She has been featured twice on
Science Friday.[37]
Awards and honors
2017 Outstanding Assistant Professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering
2013 Scientists to Watch, The Scientist Magazine
2012 Fellow, Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program (SynBio LEAP)
2012 Gold Medal and Human Practices Award, International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM)
2010 Gold Medal, International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM)
2010 Sustainability Grant, Harvard University
2009 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Health
2008 Outstanding Publication of 2008, Journal of Biological Engineering (JBE)[4]
Professional memberships
Director of Engineering Biology Research Consortium (ERBC) [38][39]