Samuel M.D. Oliveira, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Densmore lab and the lab manager of the DAMP lab, both at the Biological Design Center of Boston University. Before moving to the US in March 2019, he was a PhD student of Bioengineering and Computational Biology at the BioMediTech Institute of Tampere University in Finland.
He aims to quantitatively understand the functioning of biological systems from an engineering perspective by integrating synthetic biology, microfluidics, and optics, then apply this knowledge to engineer living organisms with computational tasks.
During his PhD, he studied how the dynamics of synthetic genetic networks, Genetic Clocks and Switches, is affected by external perturbations, such as temperature and osmotic stress, in live E. coli bacteria. Further, Samuel developed synthetic circuits and microfluidic devices that are similar to natural environments. For instance, he made use of these platforms to quantify the cell-to-cell variability of synthetic protein aggregates numbers and disposal during cell division.
As a postdoc at Densmore’s lab at Boston University, Samuel is developing software and hardware tools for lab protocols automation. In particular, He is working on an automated pipeline to develop functional sequential logic circuits in E. Coli. He is also the manager of the DAMP lab, BU’s core faculty for designing and assembling complex constructs in a modular, reproducible, and automated way to be provided for the whole SynBio community.