Hi y’all!

My name is Elizabeth Lee, but everyone calls me Liz. I am a current junior (class of 2027) and new resident of Chao College majoring in Chemical Engineering and minoring in Engineering Design. Outside of classes, I do a lot of research in the fields of microbial and metabolic engineering, particularly on non-model and other fun prokaryotic organisms. Also – little fun fact, I used to competitively figure skate and worked with 2D art (mostly painting and drawing, like the featured photo), so now I dance with Rice Dance Theater as my “creative outlet” of sorts.

A group photo Rice Dance Theater with myself circled for visual ease/proof

Last year, I took what is right now the extent of my design coursework: EDES 220. Hence, I’ve attached a picture of my team’s final product below. While the experience of taking the class was definitely worthwhile, and I can safely say that I know the engineering design process inside and out, I felt limited by my lack of knowledge of all the cool, modern machinery that’s so abundant in the OEDK. It is for this reason that I chose to take 210 at this time – so I can learn more about machinery before the rest of my design courses.

My team’s (Team Petri Pros) final product from EDES 220

Per our in-class questions, one thing I’ve made that I’m really proud of is a series of expression constructs to increase carbon flux to pyruvate in PCC 7002, a strain of cyanobacteria. This essentially means I forced a photosynthetic bacteria to make more broken down sugar, which can make all kinds of cool things for energy, pharma, and more. I’m particularly proud of this because it took rounds of online digging, digital iteration, and experimentation to find the most perfect set of modifications according to the metabolic pathway to allow for the most optimized flow. I’m proud that I was able to figure it out and problem-solve enough to prove I had the best solution, both in software and at the bench.

I’m very proud of this work, so here’s me presenting the poster for it at the 2025 AIChE ASC!

Something I hope to make in the future would be a film camera. I did a project on the history of cameras in middle school and became interested ever since. I think I said digital in class, but I – personally – was bugging and nervous for no good reason so I blanked on what I wanted to say.

To be quite honest, aside from learning the specifics on how and when to use the different sorts of machinery, I don’t have a specific goal for the class. I’m pretty go-with-the-flow for learning in all my classes, so as always, I just hope to learn something else new beyond the requisites 🙂