Yonatan Chemla, PhD

About Yonatan

Yonatan is a synthetic biologist working at the intersection of mRNA biology, hyperspectral imaging, and environmental biotechnology. He is the founding PI of the Chemla Lab, which opens March 1, 2027 in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara. After a PhD on bacterial mRNA translation at Ben-Gurion University, he came to MIT as a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Voigt Lab, where he is currently a Research Scientist and NIH K99 Pathway-to-Independence Fellow. His research is motivated by a single question: how do we take synthetic biology out of the petri dish and into the real world — without breaking it, and without breaking what's around it? On the bench, he builds tools: modular mRNA designs, hyperspectral reporters that read gene expression from satellites, and methods to track engineered microbes that have lived in soil for decades. Off the bench, he works on the regulation and policy of the same problem — through ASTM standards committees, Caltech and NAS workshops, and the 2025 Spirit of Asilomar summit.

Before science, Yonatan served for ten years as a naval officer in the Israeli Navy — ultimately appointed Executive Officer of a Saar 5 corvette in charge of 70 crew — and as a project manager at Windward, where he worked on satellite-based maritime monitoring. (A thread that, decades later, came back as hyperspectral remote sensing of bacteria.) He also holds an undergraduate degree in History, with a dissertation on the canonical gospels. He thinks the most interesting science happens at the seams between disciplines, and tries to teach the same to his students.

Read more about him on his personal website, see the lab's research areas, or jump straight to the CV below.

Appointments

Education

Selected Honors & Awards

• 2026Zuckerman Outstanding Postdoctoral Research Award · Federation of the Israeli Societies of Experimental Biology
• 2025NIH K99/R00 Pathway-to-Independence Award · National Human Genome Research Institute · 2025 – 2030
• 2025Rising Star in Bioengineering · Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, Princeton University
• 2023Best Undergraduate Mentoring Award (finalist) · MIT
• 2022Next Generation Scientist (14 of 600 selected) · 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
• 2022Best Presentation Award · Israel RNA Society Annual Meeting
• 2021Selected for the 4th Shanghai World Laureate Forum · The World Laureate Association
• 2020HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship · Awarded for three years, $220K
• 2019Excellence in Teaching Award · Ben-Gurion University
• 2017Azrieli PhD Fellowship · Awarded for three years by the Azrieli Foundation, $110K
• 2015Darom PhD Fellowship · Awarded for four years by Kreitman Graduate School, BGU, $60K
• 2014David & Malka Cohen Award for Outstanding Engineering Projects · Ben-Gurion University
• 2013Best Presentation Award · iGEM Competition, INSA, Lyon, France

Funding & Grants

• 2025–2030NIH K99/R00 · Mapping mRNA translation initiation kinetics to quantify the genome coding capacity
• 2024–2026MIT J-WAFS · Protecting water from contaminants using engineered soil bacteria
• 2024–2025MIT-MISTI (with Prof. Petri-Jaan Lahtvee) · Exploring the past release of GEMs in Estonia
• 2024–2026MIT-MISTI Seed · Characterizing mRNA genetic design principles in Bacteroidetes
• 2022–2024MIT-MISTI Middle East Climate Resilience Seed · U.S. – UAE – Israel collaboration
• 2020–2023HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship · Translation-initiation modes of operons in bacteria

Patents

• 2023U.S. 17961925 · Prediction, biosynthesis, and integration as biosensors of molecules with unique light-absorbance signatures and their in-field remote detection using hyperspectral cameras. Licensed to Fieldstone.bio.
• 2022U.S. 17870607 · Ribosome termination sequence and uses thereof.
• 2016U.S. 12163173-B2 · A highly efficient and tunable system for the incorporation of unnatural amino acids into proteins in E. coli.
• 2015U.S. 20170292139-A1 · Genetically expanded cell-free protein synthesis, methods and kits.

Teaching

Mentoring

Service & Leadership

Selected Talks

• 2025Plenary · "Tracking Engineered Microbiomes with Hyperspectral Reporters Across Time and From Space" · Annual Synthetic Biology Conference, Reichman University, Israel
• 2025Plenary, short talk · "Long-Term Fate of Recombinant Genes Released 35 Years Ago" · Genetic Engineering for a Sustainable Future, Keystone Symposia, CO
• 2024Plenary · "Engineering Microbes for Environmental Release" · International Conference on Microbiome Engineering, AIChE, Tufts University
• 2024Plenary · "Genetically Encoded Hyperspectral Reporters for Quantitative Remote Sensing" · Winter q-bio, Hawaii
• 2023Plenary · "Models and Measurements to Decipher mRNA Translation Initiation Modes" · 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Germany
• 2019Keynote · "mRNA Secondary-Structure-Stability Controls Protein Translation Reinitiation in All Bacteria" · GGE 8 Conference, Tel Aviv, Israel

Recent department seminars include Yale (MCDB), Princeton (Omenn-Darling), Imperial College London, Harvard Medical School (Systems Biology), and UC Berkeley.

Other Research & Professional Experience

Professional Memberships

• 2025 – ASTM International (American Society for Testing and Materials), Committee on Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology
• 2024 – American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)
• 2023 – Sigma Xi — The Scientific Research Honor Society (Invited Full Membership)