Markita Landry is an assistant professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a B.S. in Chemistry, and a B.A. in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an NSF GRFP fellow, and completed an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, she has held interim research positions at the Biophysics Institute at the Technical University of Munich, and at the center for nanobiosciences at Osaka University.
Prof. Landry’s research centers on the development of synthetic nanoparticle-polymer conjugates for imaging neuromodulation in the brain, and for the delivery of biomolecules and nutrients into plants. The Landry lab exploits the highly tunable chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials for the creation of bio-mimetic structures, molecular imaging, and gene editing. In her first two years as a professor, she has been awarded over 10 early career awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, The Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, the DARPA Young Investigator program, the Beckman Young Investigator program, is a Sloan Research Fellow, a Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research New Innovator, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Academies of Engineering, and is a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. Prof. Landry has authored over 30 peer-reviewer publications and is a co-inventor on 4 patents, including the first nanomaterial-based gene delivery platform to agricultural crops for GMO-free plant biotechnologies.
Prof. Landry is active in service and outreach, and is a TEDx speaker. She is a decade-long member and past chapter president for the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), and also the faculty co-mentor of the UC Berkeley Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering (ADSE). Prof. Landry has also been recognized as the 2018 Society of Hispanic and Professional Engineers Young Investigator Awardee.
