Chemistry elements
Chemistry and Biochemistry
Profile picture of Calin Plesa

Calin Plesa

Assistant Professor
UO Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact
Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact
calin@uoregon.edu
Phone: 541-346-7084
Office: M346 Knight Campus, 6231 University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-6231
Website: https://plesa.uoregon.edu/
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Education

Before joining the Knight Campus, Plesa was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and earned his doctorate in bio-nanoscience in 2015 from Delft University of Technology. He received master’s degrees in nanoscience and nanotechnology from Delft in 2009 and Chalmers University of Technology in 2010. He received a bachelor’s of applied science, engineering physics in 2007 from Simon Fraser University.

Research

Currently, Plesa’s work primarily focuses on large-scale gene synthesis, which plays an important role in functional characterization of DNA sequences and for the development of synthetic biology. Current efforts in this area are slowed by their high cost.

Plesa developed a method called DropSynth, which allows the generation of large libraries of thousands of genes and functional testing of all possible mutations at relatively low cost. This opens many new avenues of research and potential applications previously deemed too expensive.