Ariel L. Furst is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She completed her Ph.D. in the lab of Prof. Jacqueline K. Barton at the California Institute of Technology developing new cancer diagnostic strategies based on DNA charge transport. She was an A. O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Prof. Matthew Francis at UC, Berkeley developing sensors to monitor environmental pollutants. She is the recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Sloan Fellowship. She is the cofounder of three startups and is passionate about entrepreneurship, in addition to STEM outreach and increasing participation of underrepresented groups in engineering.
The Furst Lab applies electrochemistry to understand and engineer biological redox processes across sensing, energy generation, and bioproduction. Electron transfer underpins essential biological reactions, including photosynthesis, respiration, and nitrogen fixation, mainly driven by chemical electron sources and sinks. Yet, in the lab, the reliance on chemicals to study biological electron transfer has limited our understanding of these systems. We apply electrochemistry as a direct, controllable, and scalable replacement for naturally-occurring electron transfer agents to study fundamental processes and subsequently apply our learnings to develop practical technologies.
