Prior to joining Columbia, Dr. Wang was a Fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and an Instructor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wang holds B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University. Dr. Wang has been developing foundational technologies in automated genome engineering to rapidly endow cells with improved function and new traits. In 2009, Dr. Wang won the Grand Prize in the National Inventor Hall of Fame's Collegiate Inventors Competition. He is one of ten young investigators to receive the first NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and was named in Forbes 30 under 30 in Science in 2012.