Emma Jean Chory

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Emma Chory is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She received her B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University and her doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. She became interested in epigenetics when she worked with Dr. James Bradner at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute developing inhibitors of histone-modifying proteins that cause Mixed Lineage Leukemia. As a PhD student at Stanford, she worked with Gerald Crabtree studying chromatin remodeling complexes, and used synthetic biology in mammalian stem cells to discover how nucleosome turnover establishes cell fate and is mis-regulated in cancer. As postdoctoral fellow with Kevin Esvelt and Jim Collins at MIT, she developed novel systems to enable the high-throughput, systematic, and quantitative evolution of therapeutic proteins and cellular populations using automation and directed evolution.

Appointments and Affiliations

  • Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Contact Information

Education

  • Ph.D. Stanford University, 2018

Courses Taught

  • BME 791: Graduate Independent Study
  • BME 706L: Biotech Design II
  • BME 590: Special Topics in Biomedical Engineering
  • BME 493: Projects in Biomedical Engineering (GE)
  • BME 406L: Biotech Design II
  • BME 394: Projects in Biomedical Engineering (GE)

In the News

Representative Publications

  • Buchthal, Joanna, Emma Chory, Zachary Hill, Yu Zhou, Devanand Bondage, Summer DeAmelio, Julien Freeman, et al. “Heritable Immunization Establishes a New Model for Pathogen Control.” BioRxiv, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.19.629026.
  • Gretton, Dana, Brian Wang, Rey Edison, Leonard Foner, Jens Berlips, Theia Vogel, Martin Kysel, et al. “Random adversarial threshold search enables automated DNA screening.” BioRxiv, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.20.585782.
  • Chory, Emma J., Meng Wang, Michele Ceribelli, Aleksandra M. Michalowska, Stefan Golas, Erin Beck, Carleen Klumpp-Thomas, et al. “High-throughput approaches to uncover synergistic drug combinations in leukemia.” SLAS Discovery : Advancing Life Sciences R & D 28, no. 4 (June 2023): 193–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.slasd.2023.04.004.
  • Garzón-Porras, Ana María, Emma Chory, and Berkley E. Gryder. “Dynamic Opposition of Histone Modifications.” ACS Chemical Biology 18, no. 4 (April 2023): 1027–36. https://doi.org/10.1021/acschembio.1c01000.
  • Golas, Stefan, and Emma J. Chory. “Proximity labeling of endogenous protein interactions enabled by directed evolution.” Trends in Biotechnology 41, no. 3 (March 2023): 301–3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2023.01.012.