Imen Tanniche

Imen obtained her Bacherlor’s degree (2010) in Biological Engineering from the National Engineering School of Sfax, Tunisia. She obtained a Dual-program Master’s degree (2012) in Fuel Engineering & Biological Systems Engineering from the National Engineering School of Sfax and Virginia Tech. Her thesis focused on correlating antisense RNA performance with thermodynamic calculations.

She worked in the pharmaceutical industry, Opalia Pharma-Recordati Group, as a project manager in Research and Development, where she collaborated with a team of pharmacists to develop new formulations and manufacturing steps of pilot batches.

She pursued her Ph.D. in the Metabolic Engineering and Systems Biology laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. Ryan Senger, in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. In her Ph.D., she developed a new method of DNA assembly (lambda-PCR) and worked on gene regulation with synthetic small RNAs and cyanobacterium phenotype monitoring with Raman spectroscopy.

Upon graduating in 2019, she started a postdoctoral research position in Complete Genomics, where she worked on the development of methods for improving single-tube long fragment read (stLFR) library preparation for human genome sequencing. She also pursued a postdoctoral position in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech. She designed minimum synthetic inducible promoters for host response to parasites and analyzed parasites’ response to microRNAs uptake.  

In her visiting scientist role at the MicroN BASE Lab, Imen uses her expertise in synthetic biology to complete a collaborative project on engineering bacteria for tumor-targeting applications.