Kettner Griswold Jr.

Kettner Griswold Jr. is a research fellow at the George Church Lab at Harvard Medical School, and a research affiliate at the Ed Boyden Lab at MIT.

His current work focuses on developing new tools and methods in synthetic biology, such as new ways to scale de novo DNA Synthesis, and library-on-library interaction profiling and evolution strategies. As a Hertz-Draper Fellow, he will pursue his PhD at the MIT Media Lab under the joint guidance of George Church and Hertz Fellow Ed Boyden.

In 2015, Kettner was named an Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Fellow by the UPMC Center for Health Security and advised on dual use issues in synthetic biology. Additionally, as a Hertz-Draper Fellow at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, he will develop new tools 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 error-checked long-write 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.

Kettner is from Bethesda, Maryland.