Assistant Professor - Mauricio Antunes

Mauricio Antunes, Ph.D. received his B.S. degree in Agronomy and M.S. degree in Crop Sciences from the Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil. He then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in Plant Molecular Biology at Purdue University, under the supervision of Nick Carpita and Tom Hodges. After completing his doctoral degree, Antunes joined June Medford's group at Colorado State University as a postdoctoral fellow, where he was involved in pioneering work in plant synthetic biology to rationally engineer plants to function as sensitive and specific sensors of substances of interest to humans. After spending one year working in Maureen McCann's lab at the Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio) at Purdue University, Antunes returned to Colorado State University in 2010 as a Research Assistant Professor in the Biology Department. In 2018, Dr. Antunes joined the Department of Biological Sciences and the BioDiscovery Institute at UNT. Dr. Antunes' lab at UNT will center on the development and application of tools from the emerging field of synthetic biology to engineer plants with novel traits that function in a predictable and tunable manner to result in improved bioproduction.

Graduate Student - Stephanie Amack

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 is based around gene expression driven by a promoter used widely in plant synthetic biology. She is collecting data using the model plant Arabidopsis to see how single nucleotide changes in a specific regulatory region in the 35S promoter affects gene expression. She is on track to graduate with her master's degree in Fall 2020.

 

Graduate Student - Charles Anderson

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. His project in the Antunes Lab is on the design and characterization of an AND logic gate in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Charles is pursuing a career in plant synthetic biology. His hobbies include playing guitar or cello, and cooking.

 

Research Assistant - Trina Cupit

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.

 

 

 

Post-Doctoral Researcher - Savio De Siqueira Ferreira

Savio de Siqueira Ferreira started his academic career working with plant viruses (Geminivirideae family) at Universidade Federal de Viçosa - UFV (Brazil), where he received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Biochemistry (2006 and 2008). In 2009, he changed field of study to work with sugarcane transcriptome, during his PhD in Biochemistry at Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), with special interest in genes related to secondary cell wall metabolism and transcription factors regulatory networks. After receiving his Doctoral degree (2013) he started a post-doctoral fellow at the same lab (2014-2015), studying transcription factors, promoter characterization and helping in the sugarcane genome effort, with a brief period (5 months) as a visiting post-doc at The Ohio State University. After a short time back to UFV (2016) studying the transcriptome (RNA-seq) of coffee-rust fungus, he started to work as a post-doctoral fellow (2017-2019) at the LigninLab (Universidade de São Paulo) to work with phenylpropanoid metabolism and lignification in grasses. In January 2020 he joined Antunes Lab to develop studies in synthetic biology, aiming to design genetic circuits to modulate phenylpropanoid metabolism in plants.