Asher will join the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in July 2023
Dr. Asher Williams will be joining the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2023. At Columbia, her research group will harness synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and protein engineering to study and manipulate protein-carbohydrate interactions for therapeutic and biomedical applications - including drug delivery, vaccine development, and the design of diagnostic tools to better understand and treat disease. Asher is a Trinidad and Tobago national scholar and currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University in the DeLisa Group, where her research is aimed at cell-free biosynthesis of conjugate vaccines against emerging pathogens. She received her PhD in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2020, co-advised by Profs. Mattheos Koffas and Robert Linhardt, focused on engineering microorganisms for the efficient biosynthesis of carbohydrate-based drugs and related enzymes. Asher was awarded RPI’s Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship, named a Class of 2020 Changemaker and an MIT Rising Star in Chemical Engineering, and is listed by Cell Mentor as one of 1000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.
To read more, go here: