Riley Stockard

I’m not sure what drives people towards the type of science questions they like, but for me it seemed to be a latent interest since I was very young. I recently discovered an elementary school essay that foreshadowed my New Science project and PhD thesis work today. In that essay, titled Planet Earth and the Ecosystem, I gushed that “the balance of the Earth is near perfect. Almost nothing tips the scale by even a fraction of an inch…There would be no grass if the rabbits didn’t get eaten. The amazing thing is there are enough of one animal to keep the grass cut short, and enough predators to keep the grass growing [so rabbits don’t go extinct].”

As a New Science fellow, I finally got to indulge in my interest in ecology and homeostasis over a decade later. Like how foxes and rabbits depend on each other to balance their populations, many resilient and powerful systems on Earth, like the nitrogen cycle or our gut microbiome, are driven by multi-species relationships. As a synthetic biologist, I am interested in how we can control this balance. For my project, I investigated how E. coli can be engineered to infiltrate and “reprogram” nearby microbes with horizontal gene transfer to control the overall behavior of the consortium. This project has applications in fighting disease-causing biofilms through a Trojan Horse strategy. In an opinion piece I authored as part of the fellowship, I also explored how horizontal gene transfer can protect microbial species from runaway mutants that would otherwise extinguish the entire population – similar to the balance of the foxes and rabbits.

Though I only had a summer for preliminary experiments, I tested promising experimental chassis and genetic parts to establish the plausibility of this approach. Most importantly, I was finally able to dig deeply into my fascination with multicellular systems and battle-test my most exciting ideas. The best of these ideas were challenged, transformed, and explored again and again in my future PhD thesis work.

As a PhD student in Wendell Lim’s lab at UCSF, I now work on mammalian cells, but still think about the “ecology” of cellular interdependence in tissues. My goal is to engineer multicellular circuits that achieve complex behaviors, such as multi-gate logic or homeostatic control, and which is modulated by their spatial organization. This core question of how spatial organization of multicellular systems affects the overall function was initially defined as a New Science fellow.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity by New Science to dive into the scientific questions that have been burning since I was apparently 12 years old. The support and radical freedom from New Science to run my own research goals and lab space was critical for developing my personal scientific voice. New Science was an incredible, unique opportunity, and I will be remembering this experience as a trajectory-defining moment in my career.