Bernardo Pollak is a 4th year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in Prof. Haseloff’s laboratory. As part of his PhD, he has been developing DNA assembly systems, methods for quantitative characterisation of gene expression and tools for precise manipulation of gene expression for engineering of morphogenesis in Marchantia.

Before joining the Haseloff group, he obtained his undergrad degree in Biochemistry after coursing one year of Civil Engineering in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. During his undergrad thesis, he gathered support and led the first team from Chile to participate in iGEM in 2012. He has been interested in marine luminescent bacteria, isolating environmental strains and performing directed evolution experiments to obtain optimised lux reporters. As part of his luminescence work, he produced a bioluminescent dress featured in Wired as part of a collaboration with Anton Kan, former member of the Haseloff lab, and Victoria Geany from the Royal College of Arts.