Dr. David Karig is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Clemson University. Prior to joining Clemson University, he was a Senior Professional Staff member in the Research and Exploratory Development Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where he maintains an affiliation as a Temp on Call. Prior to joining APL in 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2007 at Princeton University, where he conducted his thesis work in the area of synthetic biology. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University. Currently, his research focuses on systems and synthetic biology at different scales. At the subcellular scale, his interests are in the realm of cell-free synthetic biology, including the development of gene circuits as well as efforts to make cell-free protein expression systems robust for field applications. At the multicellular scale, his interests include the engineering of cell-cell communication to coordinate the behavior of cell populations for pattern formation, biomaterial fabrication, and sophisticated biosensing. At the multi-species scale, his research interests include probing the spatial and taxonomic structure of the microbiome, as well as leveraging synthetic biology tools to study microbiome principles and, ultimately, develop applications in microbiome engineering.
