Virginia W. Cornish

Virginia W. Cornish is the Helena Rubinstein Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Systems Biology at Columbia University. She is a pioneer in synthetic biology, focusing on engineering yeast for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Her research integrates chemical synthesis and genetic tools to expand cellular capabilities, including yeast biosensors and protein engineering.

Education:

• B.A. in Biochemistry, Columbia University (1991)
• Ph.D. in Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley (1996)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT (1996–1999)

Research Interests:

Her work spans synthetic biology, directed evolution, and live-cell imaging. Key areas include:

• Development of yeast biosensors for pathogen detection
• Engineering yeast communities for therapeutic applications
• Expanding the genetic code for noncanonical amino acid incorporation
• Chemical tagging for protein visualization and manipulation

Recent Article Trends:

Recent work emphasizes yeast-based biosensors for clinical diagnostics, scalable peptide-GPCR communication systems, and advances in fluorescent tagging for multiplex imaging. Her group also explores genetic code expansion to study protein dynamics and function.

Awards:

• NSF Career Award (2000)
• Sloan Fellowship (2003)
• Protein Society Sigal Award (2009)
• ACS Pfizer Enzyme Chemistry Award (2009)
• HHMI Gilliam Adviser (2021)

Advising & Grants:

She advises a dynamic lab of ~20 students/postdocs. Active grants include NIH, NSF, and DARPA funding for synthetic biology and therapeutics. Her team collaborates on projects like vaccine development and metabolic engineering.

Labs & Teams:

Her lab at Columbia focuses on translational synthetic biology, with facilities for genetic engineering, imaging, and bioassays. Collaborations include projects on yeast-based diagnostics and protein engineering with groups at Harvard, MIT, and Memorial Sloan Kettering.