Ben Burke (he/him)
Graduate Student
DMSE
Email: bdburke@mit.edu
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Ben is a diehard Boston sports fan. He traveled a full 40 miles to arrive at MIT in the fall of 2018 as an undergraduate, where he majored in Chemical-Biological Engineering and played on the Varsity Baseball team. Ben joined the Furst Lab in January 2021 after a COVID-19 gap year working at a lithium battery research company. As an undergraduate researcher in the Furst Lab, he explored self-assembled nanocoatings to protect microbes from processing stressors and used synthetic biology to modulate external electron transport in Shewanella oneidensis.
In the fall of 2023, Ben began his PhD in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His current research focuses on leveraging DNA self-assembly to drive functionality in both abiotic and biotic systems for the valorization of single-carbon and nitrogen feedstocks.