Matt Carpenter is a Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology
PhD student advised by Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin. In 2019,
he received a B.S. in Molecular Biology from The University
of Texas at Dallas, where he was a Eugene McDermott
Scholar. His research activities as an undergraduate included
studying cellular engineering under Dr. Eric Kildebeck and
Dr. Walter Voit at The University of Texas at Dallas, nodule
organogenesis under Dr. Giles Oldroyd at the John Innes
Centre, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae stress response under
Dr. Andreas Doncic at The University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center. As a student in Dr. Ajo-Franklin’s lab, Matt
engineers bacteria to use extracellular electron transfer to
communicate with electrical systems for applications in
environmental biosensing. In the 2020-2021 academic year,
he served as a Recruitment Chair in the SSPB Graduate
Student Association.