Travel Grant Recipients
Hao Nghi Luu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (NSF GRFP) in Professor Angela Belcher’s lab. Her research combines synthetic biology and materials science to engineer baker’s yeast for water remediation. She develops yeast strains that can uptake and detoxify toxic elements such as selenium, with the long-term goal of creating low-cost, sustainable technologies for contaminant removal from water and critical-materials recovery. Before MIT, Hao earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biological engineering from Princeton University, with a minor in materials science and engineering. Her undergraduate thesis on yeast proliferation in porous 3D environments received the Princeton Materials Institute’s Best Senior Thesis Award and continues to shape her interest in how microbes behave in realistic remediation environments.