Why reef exists.
Building a genetic circuit is still a slow, blind design-build-test loop, and funded teams burn scarce wet-lab budget iterating circuits that fail for predictable reasons. reef closes that loop: design on a free, honest, dynamics-aware engine, submit it for characterization, and get real data and de-risking back, so the engine gets smarter with every result. We are the cloud lab for genetic circuits.
Team
Tomer Rivir Yonatan Zilbershtein
Cofounder
Tomer is a cofounder of reef. He trained in synthetic biology at the University of Florida, in the lab of Dr. Andrew Hanson, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in plant synthetic biology, doing the hands-on, at-the-bench work that reef is built to accelerate. A software engineer by background and a medical student at the University of Arizona, he works where biology and code meet, and reef is his view of how the tooling around genetic circuits should work: a cloud lab that will characterize any circuit, whatever it was designed in, paired with an honest design engine of its own for teams that want one. The aim is to make getting real data on a circuit both faster and within reach of far more than the handful of labs that can afford it today.
Sahil Khan
Cofounder
Sahil thinks in systems, whichever one he's borrowed for the week. He's worked on spacecraft mechanics at the Naval Research Laboratory and manufacturing lines at Estée Lauder, in between a biomedical engineering BS/MS at Drexel. He built the habit of moving fast under real deadlines by running Drexel IEEE, where he organizes DragonHacks, Philadelphia's largest student-run hackathon.