Pivot Bio 2021 interns: Engineering the future of fertilizer

Students from across the U.S. join Pivot Bio each summer to get hands-on experiences in a high-growth ag startup.  As interns, they are valuable members of the Pivot Bio team and make lasting contributions on the company during their time here.

As they return to school for the fall semester, several of our 2021 interns reflected on their experiences and shared what they learned in the first of this three-part series. 

While many Pivot Bio interns spent the summer analyzing results in the field, I spent my time engineering the microbes that make that crop growth possible.

I’m a computer science and biomedical engineering student at Duke University. This summer, I interned with the research and development team at Pivot Bio’s Boston, MA laboratory. 

When I was looking for an internship, I wanted an experience that addressed climate change and improved people’s lives. I read about Pivot Bio in a book by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and was motivated by Pivot Bio’s impact on sustainable agriculture in the field of synthetic biology. Everything aligned when I was given the opportunity to join the team and contribute.

During my internship, my focus was to help the organization screen the microbial strains that show the most promise for nitrogen fixation potential in a high-throughput manner. My internship project explored alternative ways to measure an organism’s effectiveness based on their responses with a highly scalable platform.

With experiments, a lot of things don’t work the first time, but my project showed early success which made for an exciting and productive summer!

This is the second in a series of stories and experiences from Pivot Bio interns.