Rice University recruited Caroline Ajo-Franklin, Ph.D., from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory through a Recruitment of Established Investigators Award. She has received an appointment at tenured full professor level in the Department of BioSciences within the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice. Dr. Ajo-Franklin’s area of research is cutting edge – the challenging issue of gastrointestinal cancer prevention and treatment from both a fundamental and applied perspective. 

Read More

Rice University recruited Caroline Ajo-Franklin, Ph.D., from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory through an Established Investigators Award. Dr. Ajo-Franklin’s area of research is cutting edge – the challenging issue of gastrointestinal cancer prevention and treatment from both a fundamental and applied perspective. She has published a seminal set of papers on programming electrical communication between cells and materials through synthetic biology approaches, and she has discovered novel protein systems in the gut microbiome that mediate extracellular electron transfer.

Dr. Ajo-Franklin is recognized as an international leader in the fields of synthetic biology and electro microbiology because of her groundbreaking success in programing cells to communicate electrically with devices. By building on these innovations, she is poised to create a new generation of affordable bioelectronic biosensors for cancer, devices that merge conductive materials and biological electronics for dynamic sensing within the gastrointestinal system (digital pills). These devices will be developed to support improved methods for colorectal cancer screening and a greater understanding of etiology. 

Read Less