The main preprint from my postdoc is live! biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… The core idea is to try to make synthetic biology much more systematic and precise, akin to more mature fields of engineering. This was an ambitious project, it started all the way back in February of 2020 and is only just now wrapping up! Thankfully there were no events in that timeframe, either around the world or specifically here at Harvard, that made things any more difficult than they needed to be. The fundamental dilemma is that we are often forced to do one of two things when designing a synthetic circuits: either we can navigate a laborious design-build-test cycle where we iteratively optimize a circuit's performance tuning one parameter at a time, or we can screen a huge array of variants using techniques like directed evolution and pick the winners and have little insight into the molecular details of why one design worked better than the others. Our idea was to try to get the best of both worlds, to combine precise mechanistic insights with extremely high throughput in such a way that we could systematically study the whole design space of a given circuit architecture.