Maria is a Strain Engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks (Boston-USA), where she makes biology easier to engineer by building an automated foundry to design and deliver organisms. Enthusiastic about programming DNA since she was 16, Maria co-founded a synthetic biology hub in Amazonas-Brazil. Currently, she’s engineering yeast as a triterpenoid manufacturing platform, leveraging machine learning, high-throughput systems, and automation. Maria engineered >thousand strains and coordinated the screening of rationally engineered enzymes and metagenomic mining libraries. She fine-tuned the expression level of diverse plant-enzymes and applied combinatorial approaches to balance synthetic metabolic pathways. Previously, Maria optimized E. coli for environmental and industrial through designing improved regulatory systems engineering synthetic promoters. Maria’s main interest is to build automated tools for prediction, design and fine-tuning of genetic circuits.