About · UC Santa Barbara Bioengineering
About the Lab
The Chemla Lab — a new lab at UC Santa Barbara — decodes how genetic design choices translate into biological performance, and uses what we learn to build organisms and molecules that do useful work in the world.
New lab
The Chemla Lab is a new lab in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara. Yonatan Chemla is currently a Research Scientist (postdoctoral) in the Voigt Lab at MIT, Department of Biological Engineering, and is actively recruiting the lab’s founding members — see how to join. Department website: bioengineering.ucsb.edu.
About the PI
Yonatan Chemla is a synthetic biologist and biomolecular engineer, and the founding Principal Investigator of the Chemla Lab, a new lab in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara. His doctoral work at Ben-Gurion University focused on bacterial translation, genetic code expansion, and biophysical modeling of mRNA. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Christopher A. Voigt at MIT — supported by an NIH K99 Pathway-to-Independence award and a Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowship — he developed tools for measuring gene expression in complex systems and studying the design and regulation of engineered bacteria for environmental release.
He holds a B.Sc. in Biological Engineering and a Ph.D. in Biology from Ben-Gurion University, and a B.A. in General History from the Open University of Israel.
What we do
The lab works at the intersection of mRNA biology, synthetic biology, and environmental biotechnology. We build tools — hyperspectral reporters, modular cell-free systems, and high-throughput functional readouts — and use them to learn how to deploy biotechnologies safely and effectively beyond the bench.
Values
- Rigor. We build the controls and the tools we need before drawing conclusions.
- Collaboration. Our questions span fields, and we work openly with people across them.
- Real-world impact. We test our designs where they matter — including outside the incubator.
- Mentorship. Lab members come first.
Funding & affiliations
The PI and the lab gratefully acknowledge support from MIT, the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), and the NIH NHGRI K99/R00 Pathway-to-Independence award.
Want to dig deeper? See our research themes, publications, or learn how to join the lab.