Principal investigator

Dr. Amy J. Karlsson
Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Keystone Professor, A. James Clark School of Engineering
Member, Biophysics Graduate Program
Affiliate Faculty Member, Fischell Department of Bioengineering

BS, Chemical Engineering, Iowa State University, 2003
PhD, Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2009
NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University, 2009-2012

Dr. Karlsson is originally from Rush City, Minnesota, a very small town north of the Twin Cities. Although she misses the snow, she loves being so close to all the great restaurants and museums found in the DC area. When she's not busy with research or teaching, Dr. Karlsson likes to travel with her husband, read, make pottery, and play with her overly friendly puppy.
​

Graduate students

​
Dinara Konakbayeva
PhD Candidate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
MS, Chemical Engineering, Howard University, 2019
BS, Chemical Engineering, Nazarbayev University, 2017

Originally hailing from Kazakhstan, Dinara has been enjoying the DC area for a few years--but she's been a little disappointed in our weather. She's longing for a great winter with LOTS of snow. We can't guarantee the snow, but we can guarantee she'll see lots of proteins!
​
​
Wright Makambi
PhD Candidate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
BS, Chemical Engineering, University of Maryland, 2019

Wright joins our lab as a local, having grown up just down the road in Silver Spring. Even though he's relatively new to the lab, we've already figured out he's a little quackers, and we expect he'll soon have even our fungal cells quacking up with his humor.
​

​Renjhe Chung 
MS Candidate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
BA, Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 2020

Renjhe comes to us from Taiwan, and his happy demeanor is sure to make you smile. He's jumped right into his project on cell-penetrating peptides and is making great progress producing challenging fusions of cell-penetrating peptides to proteins.
​

Undergraduate students

 
Natalya Brown
​BS Candidate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Natalya joined our lab in fall of 2022 to work on displaying peptides on yeast cells. She's generally been very happy in the lab, except that one time when someone (*cough* Dr. Karlsson) tricked her into tasting Vegemite at a lab meeting.
 
Andrew Loveland
​BS Candidate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Andrew joined our lab in fall of 2022 to work on producing a protein for our lipid transport protein project. He thinks protein production and Western blots are great, but please don't try to feed him any onions.

High school students



We currently have no high school students in the lab but we will consider high school students at any time.

Interested in the amazing people that previously were members of our lab?
Find them on the ALUMS page.