Dr. Richie Kohman is the Lead of the Synthetic Biology Platform, a research division at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute which specializes in the reading and writing of biological systems for applications in healthcare, computing, and the environment
He oversees all research in The Platform, encompassing projects related to in situ omics, viral engineering & gene delivery, neurotechnology, cell & tissue engineering, gene editing, and nucleic acid synthesis & sequencing. He is an expert in developing novel chemistries for the analysis of biological tissues, especially for neural tissue. He is currently principal investigator of an NIH-funded project dedicated to developing new tools for molecular connectomics, and he previously led, along with George Church, the IARPA MICrONS project which aimed to reverse engineer the mammalian cortex.
Prior to joining the Wyss Institute, Richie worked as Group Leader at the startup company Expansion Technologies, Inc. where he brought techniques and reagents for high resolution molecular mapping of tissues to market. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University with an affiliation at the MIT Media Lab. His work has been published and highlighted by top journals and magazines such as Nature, Science, Forbes, and Wired.
