Stephanie Amack - Graduate Student

Born and raised in Costa Rica, Stephanie moved to Austin, TX in 2002. She earned a BS in Biology with a specialization in botany from Texas State University in San Marcos in 2007. She went on to work in education for 5 years, primarily with the Del Valle Independent School district where she was an individualized lesson planner and tutor for struggling students. In 2012, she decided to enroll in the Biotechnology program at Austin Community College as she wanted to transition from education to her first passion, biology. It was through the program that she was able to work at two internship simultaneously - one with the Virology Department of the Department of Human and Health Services performing flu subtypings and another with Bioo Scientific (now Perkin-Elmer) as a manufacturer of ELISA kits. She went on to work at Cenetron Diagnostics, a small molecular diagnostics company involved in clinical trials for infectious disease for two years. She worked briefly at the ACC Bioincubator, a shared space for start-up companies, with Lung Therapeutics doing analysis on mouse lung homogenates to determine if a proprietary drug was effective in increasing collagen expression in lungs with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. She arrived in Denton in 2018 and was lucky enough to find Dr. Antunes to work with. Her project was based around gene expression driven by a promoter used widely in plant synthetic biology. Stephanie finished her Master's degree in December of 2021, publishing two papers, and is currently a graduate student at UT Health in Houston, TX.

Charles Anderson - Graduate Student

Charles received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of North Texas, during which time he worked on a project analyzing the protein and oil levels of cottonseed at UNT's Center for Plant Lipid Research. He started UNT's Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Graduate Program in January of 2019. Charles worked on the design and characterization of an AND logic gate in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Charles graduated with a Master's degree in December of 2022, and is now pursuing a career in plant synthetic biology working at a biotech company in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He published two papers from his work at UNT. His hobbies include playing guitar or cello, and cooking.

Armin Tutnjic - Graduate student

Armin graduated in December of 2023 with an MA degree in Biology and is currently preparing to attend Medical School.

Trina Cupit - Research Assistant

Trina received her B.S. in Biology at the University of North Texas in 2004. She began her position as Research Assistant with the Antunes Lab in September 2019.