Mock Plesa Lab News

Department of Bioengineering

The Plesa Lab

Large scale protein engineering and characterization

Plesa Lab News

 

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Plesa Receives Tenure, Promoted to Associate Professor of Bioengineering
Calin Plesa, Ph.D., was recently promoted to associate professor with indefinite tenure in the Department of Bioengineering. Plesa joined the Knight Campus in June 2019 and has since built a research program that is reshaping how scientists design and test genetic sequences at scale.
a hand pulling a library from a bookshelf.
A Smarter Way to Find DNA

New research from the Plesa lab offers a tool for scientists to find exact DNA sequences from large libraries in a fraction of the time.

calin plesa
Plesa Receives the 2025 OVPRI Innovation and Impact Award

Calin Plesa, assistant professor of bioengineering, is recognized for his accomplishments as a nationally and internationally recognized leader in synthetic biology, gene synthesis, and protein engineering, and in particular, his role as co-founder, platform architect, and scientific advisor of SynPlexity, Inc.

Andrew and Calin in front of the Bioengineering banner
Andrew Holston Successfully Defends his Thesis!

Congrats, Dr. Holston! 

Natanya Villegas PhD Thesis Defense
Natanya Villegas Successfully Defends her Thesis!

Congrats, Dr. Villegas! 

Calin Plesa headshot with text announcing his CZI award
Plesa receives prestigious Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant

The Knight Campus researcher and his team will apply the grant to scaling up his revolutionary DropSynth technology.

Three people in a lab with street clothes
Plesa Receives Murdock Trust Commercialization Grant
Knight Campus assistant professor Calin Plesa has received a $75,000 grant from the MJ Murdock Charitable Trust through its Commercialization Initiation Program
Knight Campus-based iGEM team standing before green iGEM logo statue in a conference hall
Knight Campus-based iGem Team Wins Silver Medal
The UO iGEM team, advised by Knight Campus Department of Bioengineering assistant professor Calin Plesa, competed at the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris in October and brought home a silver medal in the Infectious Diseases category.
Portrait of Natanya Villegas
Villegas wins People's Choice Award

 

Portrait of Natanya Villegas
Natanya receives the 2024 William R. Sistrom Memorial Scholarship

Congrats, Natanya!

The Plesa Lab 

Founded in 2020, the Plesa Lab is a synthetic biology research group within the University of Oregon's Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Based in the Department of Bioengineering in Eugene, Oregon, the Plesa Lab builds scalable systems to accelerate the pace at which we understand and engineer biological protein-based systems.