Matt Carpenter is a Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology PhD student advised by Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin. In 2019, he received a B.S. in Molecular Biology from The University of Texas at Dallas, where he was a Eugene McDermott Scholar. His research activities as an undergraduate included studying cellular engineering under Dr. Eric Kildebeck and Dr. Walter Voit at The University of Texas at Dallas, nodule organogenesis under Dr. Giles Oldroyd at the John Innes Centre, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae stress response under Dr. Andreas Doncic at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. As a student in Dr. Ajo-Franklin’s lab, Matt engineers bacteria to use extracellular electron transfer to communicate with electrical systems for applications in environmental biosensing. In the 2020-2021 academic year, he served as a Recruitment Chair in the SSPB Graduate Student Association.