Student Profiles

Benjamin graduated from Harvard University with a degree in computer science in 2020. As an undergraduate, he focused extensively on research, with topics ranging from robotic chemical synthesis to nutritional science to biological defense. Beginning his sophomore year, Benjamin worked with collaborators at Indiana University and MIT to develop a robotic system capable of synthesizing peptides and peptoids. He continued this research as an undergraduate research fellow in the lab of George Church at Harvard Medical School during his junior year and remains the lead software developer of the project. Additionally, Benjamin developed software for the optimization of daily meal plans. For this work, he was given the Emerging Leader in Nutrition award by the American Society for Nutrition at their national convention.

Since his sophomore year, Benjamin has worked at Lab41, the machine learning research lab of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the US Intelligence Community. There, he has focused on developing bioinformatic methods for determining the origin of outbreaks of infectious disease as well as identifying and attributing deliberate genetic engineering in pathogens from sequencing data. At In-Q-Tel, he has published four papers, all as first or sole author, and presented at several international conferences.

As an NIH Oxford scholar, Benjamin will be joining the labs of Dr. Eugene Koonin at NCBI and Prof. Peter Simmonds at Oxford. He intends to focus on metagnomics-based pathogen discovery and comparative genomics. Outside of academia, he enjoys contributing to open-source software development, listening to audiobooks, and experimenting with cooking.