ARPA-H POSEIDON project awarded to CMU/Ginkgo Bioworks team!

Honored and thrilled to represent the team as PI for this ARPA-H POSEIDON project, which brings together phenomenal researchers across academia and industry. We come from CMU engineering, Ginkgo Bioworks, the University of Pittsburgh, Platypus Bio NZ, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, KU Leuven, and Velentium Medical.

In this ambitious project we aim to tackle one of the grand challenges in cancer medicine, the early detection of stage 1 tumors, with the aim of making cancer detection affordable and convenient for everyone! Read the CMU press release here.

Lainie and Zijuan present at the CMU BME Forum and Zijuan wins the Best Abstract Award!

Congrats to Lainie Beauchemin and Zijuan Liang for presenting their work at the Carnegie Mellon Forum on Biomedical Engineering on September 19, 2025. We are delighted to announce that Zijuan won The Best Abstract award for her poster abstract, and she was invited to give The Best Abstract Talk at the forum! Many thanks for the organizers of the CMU BME Forum for such an exciting event.

Taryn's "Microswimmers that Flex" review published in Accounts of Materials Research

Taryn's review "Microswimmers That Flex: Advancing Microswimmers with Templated Assembly and Responsive DNA Nanostructures" was published in Accounts of Materials Research. This invited review and perspective describes recent progress towards experimental realization of responsible microswimmers made with compliant DNA components.

Congrats to Taryn and co-advisor Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter on providing this exciting and useful guide to the micro/nanorobotics community!

Welcome to our new lab members Irene, Grace and Sarah!

This summer we are excited to welcome undergraduate researcher Irene Yap and our two new postdoctoral researchers, Grace Rohaley and Sarah Weintraub. Irene is Biochemistry undergraduate who is joining us from UCSD. Grace is a SAXS expert who will be working 50% MMBL on high-throughput nanotechnology production and 50% on SAXS research at the Materials Characterization Facility. Sarah is a cloning expert who will leading new lab efforts in automated science with with Prof. Rumi Naik.

Prof. Taylor presents our microswimmers work including Taryn's new review paper at the 2025 Transducers Conference!

Many thanks to Ellis Meng, Jack Judy and the DNA Devices session chairs Lourdes Basabe and Jungchul Lee for the invitation to speak at the 23rd International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (Transducers 2025).

Prof. Taylor presented our team's work on magnetic microswimmers, highlighting the PhD. research and upcoming review paper "Microswimmers that Flex" by Taryn Imamura (who is co-advised by Sarah Bergbreiter).

Taryn and Nick present on DNA-linked colloidal microrobots at ICRA 2025!

Congrats to Taryn Imamura and Nick Chung for presenting their exciting work on colloidal "DNA" robots presented at ICRA 2025! Taryn and equal co-author Teresa Kent (from co-advisor Sarah Bergbreiter's lab) developed a methodology for extracting locomotion information for magnetically actuated microswimmers in complex environments with dynamic fluid flows. This work is essential for translating, pun intended, this technology into target applications.

Undergraduate researcher, Nick Chung, worked closely with Taryn and the two have also developed a workflow for dynamic reorientation of microswimmers to control microswimmer heading irrespective of magnetic moment of an individual swimmer. Nick presented this this work at the Unusual Robots workshop at ICRA.

Prof. Taylor presents our PNA nanostructure work & MoleculeCrafter software at FNANO 2025!

Prof. Taylor presented our team's work on peptide nucleic acid (PNA) nanotechnology, generative nanostructure design and our MoleculeCrafter software for making articulated molecular models at the 2025 Foundations of Nanoscience meeting in Snowbird, UT.

Thank you to the organizers of the FNANO 2025 meeting for the invitation to speak! And thank you our wonderful collaborators Bradley Pentelute (Chemistry, MIT) and Jonathan Cagan (MechE, CMU) for the exciting collaboration on PNA nanotechnology and generative nanostructure design.