Jeff Tabor, PhD

Professor of Bioengineering and Biosciences

Lab Manager

Chris Lancaster, MS

Postdocs

Eric Wold, PhD

Rice Bioengineering

Developing inhibitors of bacterial two-component systems that regulate virulence and antibiotic resistance

Cristina Palma

Rice Bioengineering

Decoding bacterial stress responses using optogenetics and mathematical modeling

Bryan Lakey, PhD

Rice Bioengineering

High-throughput characterization of response regulator DNA-binding specificity

Ya Zhang

Rice Bioengineering

Characterization of a novel bacterial neuropeptide sensor

Abbas Ghaddar

Rice Bioengineering

Characterizing host-microbiome interactions for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes

PhD Students

Caleigh Roleck

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Engineering bacteria to respond to host signals

Elena Musteata

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Developing inhibitors of virulence-linked bacterial two-component systems

Maxwell Hunt

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Computational characterization of Two Component Systems

Kevin Lorch

Rice Bioengineering

Screening the human gut microbiome for two-component system diagnostic biosensors

Mitch Syberg-Olsen

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Enzymatic DNA synthesis

Daniel Haller

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Undertanding sporulation in Bacillus subtilis through optogenetics

Jeffrey Alejandro Vanegas

Rice Bioengineering

Engineering bacteria to sense chemical contaminants

Gayathri Prakash

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Protein engineering to enable light-directed functionality

Hasani Everett

Rice Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB)

Engineering DNA polymerases to adopt novel nucleotide specificities

Undergraduates

Shereena Johnson

Rice Bioengineering, ’25

Hannah Li

Rice Biosciences, ’25

Vedha Penmetcha

Rice Biosciences, ’25

Jacob Lei

Rice Bioengineering, ’26