Erika is a former astronomer and current synthetic biologist. As an undergraduate at Caltech, Erika worked on topics in computational physics including space mission orbit design at NASA and computational protein design at D. E. Shaw Research. Erika worked with Kevin Esvelt at MIT during her PhD, where she used laboratory automation to tackle problems in synthetic biology. She led an academic lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK focused on using Robotics-Accelerated Evolution to push the limits of biotech for use on Earth and in Space. In 2021 she founded Align to Innovate, a nonprofit improving the reproducibility, scalability, and shareability of life science research with programmable experiments. Erika is now the CEO of Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit that engineers microbes for Mars.