Sarah Richardson earned a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland in 2004 and a Ph.D. in human genetics and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2011. She specialized in the design of genomes: as a DOE Computational Graduate Fellow she designed a synthetic yeast genome; as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow of Genomics at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she worked on massive scale synthetic biology projects and the integration of computational genomics with experimental genomics; and as the CEO of MicroByre she leads the construction of genomic toolkits for non-model prokaryotes. All of which is to say that she uses DNA to teach bacteria to do tricks on command. Trained in both computational and molecular biology, she has a very unique perspective on the emerging technologies made possible by “synthetic” biology.