Karmella Haynes

Karmella Ann Haynes is an American biomedical engineer and associate professor at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She researches how chromatin is used to control cell development in biological tissue.

Early life and education Haynes was born and raised in St. Louis. She received her B.S. in biology from Florida A&M University (where she had received a full scholarship) in 1999 . While at Florida A&M, she participated in a summer research program working with Mary-Lou Pardue at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of the MIT Summer Research Program.

Haynes did her graduate work in the lab of Sarah Elgin at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow, she completed her first postdoctoral fellowship in teaching at Davidson College under the guidance of Laurie Heyer and Malcolm Campbell. She was introduced to synthetic biology and became a member of Davidson's 2006 iGEM team.

Haynes went on to complete a second postdoctoral fellowship in Pamela Silver's lab at Harvard Medical School where she created artificial transcription factors which activated genes based on histone methylation. There, her lab focused on creating epigenetic machinery that can regulate DNA. The proteins themselves are fusion transcription factors, which can target particular genes. She hopes to increase the use of technology in therapeutics, working on tissue regeneration and customizable protein-based drugs. In 2015 she was awarded a K01 grant to study the use of modular peptide motifs to build synthetic chromatin proteins that activate dormant therapeutic genes. During her time at ASU, she was the faculty advisor for the ASU iGEM team.

In 2018, Haynes moved to the W.H. Coulter Biomedical Engineering Department at Georgia Tech/Emory University. She was on the responsible conduct committee for IGEM in 2018 and 2019.

Public engagement Haynes has appeared on PBS, talking about biotechnology and disease. Alongside research, Haynes is an accomplished artist. In 2011, she painted her poster presentation for the Fifth International Meeting of Synthetic Biology (SB5.0) conference. Her artwork is still on the walls at Harvard University. She has been featured twice on Science Friday.

Awards and honors 2017 Outstanding Assistant Professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering 2013 Scientists to Watch, The Scientist Magazine 2012 Fellow, Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program (SynBio LEAP) 2012 Gold Medal and Human Practices Award, International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) 2010 Gold Medal, International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) 2010 Sustainability Grant, Harvard University 2009 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Health 2008 Outstanding Publication of 2008, Journal of Biological Engineering (JBE) SynBioLEAP alum AIChE

Notable papers As of August 16, 2020 based on Google Scholar citations: cis-Acting determinants of heterochromatin formation on Drosophila melanogaster chromosome four (111 citations) Preparing synthetic biology for the world (97 citations) Element 1360 and RNAi components contribute to HP1-dependent silencing of a pericentric reporter (94 citations) The impact of chromatin dynamics on Cas9-mediated genome editing in human cells (51 citations) Eukaryotic systems broaden the scope of synthetic biology (51 citations)