Markita del Carpio Landry

Associate professor

Year

2023
Program

Schmidt Science Polymaths
Institution

University of California, Berkeley
Field of Study

Bioengineering
Location

Berkeley, USA

Markita Landry is an associate professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics and a Certificate in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Markita studied single-molecule polymer elasticity with high-resolution optical traps during her PhD and studied developed microscopy approaches to image nanoparticle surfaces with single-molecule resolution during her postdoctoral research.

Her current research centers on the development of synthetic nanoparticle-polymer conjugates for imaging neuromodulation in the brain, and for the delivery of genetic materials into plants. The Landry lab exploits the highly tunable chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials for the creation of bio-mimetic structures, molecular imaging, and plant genome editing. The Landry Lab has developed a suite of optical probes that enable synaptic-scale imaging of neuromodulators and neuropeptides that govern development and whose aberrant signaling leads to psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease. The Landry Lab has also discovered a class of nanomaterials that enables passive delivery of genetic material into plants which has greatly advanced plant synthetic biology.Markita is a member of the scientific advisory boards and a consultant for several major agricultural companies, and co-founder and CSO of Biophilia Genetics. She is a recent recipient of over 40 career awards, including awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the McKnight Foundation, the DARPA Young Investigator program, the Beckman Young Investigator program, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the NSF CAREER award, is a Sloan Research Fellow, an FFAR New Innovator, and is a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.