New CBRC faculty - Prof. Carlos Duarte, Prof. Charlotte A. E. Hauser, Prof. Taous Meriem Laleg

Professor Carlos Duarte is the director of the Red Sea Research Center, a professor of marine science and the Tarek Ahmed Juffali Research Chair in Red Sea Ecology. ​His research focuses on understanding the impacts of global change in marine ecosystems, addressing all components from microbes to megafauna. His research involves two nodes of separate but complementary interests: one on the metabolic and elemental budgets of marine ecosystems and their connectivity in space, and the other on the stability and dynamics of marine habitats and the maintenance of biodiversity, including demographics, space occupation and gene flow. His CBRC engagement is mainly focused on metagenomics.

Professor Charlotte A. E. Hauser is a professor of bioscience. Her research interests align at the interfaces between chemistry, biomedicine, bioengineering and nanotechnology. Focus is on the development of platform technologies, using smart nanomaterials for regenerative, biomedical and environmental applications.

Her interest refers to the rational molecular design, synthesis and mechanistic understanding of novel supramolecular structures. Investigated systems include peptide-based nanostructures with an innate propensity to self-assemble to biomimetic architectures applicable for biomedical applications such as cell substrates, sensors and 3D tissue scaffolds for regenerative medicine. Bottom-up nanofabrication is a powerful tool for the development of functional tissue equivalents, organotypic tissues and devices. Moreover, these biomimetic supramolecular constructs will be used for the design and fabrication of novel organ-on-a-chip devices and disease models.

Furthermore, Professor Hauser is interested in 3D bioprinting, using supramolecular organotypic constructs to fabricate high-throughput platforms for drug screening, pathogen detection and other diagnostic purposes. Synthetic biology approaches are explored for the generation of functional biomaterial.

Associate Professor Taous Meriem Laleg is a professor of electrical engineering. Her work is in the general area of mathematical control theory, systems modelling and their applications. She has also worked and collaborated on a variety of applications for infinite dimensional systems, including desalination, medical imaging, and solar distributed collectors.

We look forward to many fruitful collaborations with our new faculty members.