The goal of synthetic biology is to make the construction of novel biological systems into a practical and useful engineering discipline.

My research focuses on category dynamics in markets. Categories are important because they influence how people think about organizations and products. In the modern economy, market categories change at an increasingly fast pace as innovation quickens and competition becomes more fierce. This means we can no longer take a static approach to understanding markets in which firms compete. I study how evaluations of firms and products depend on the rapidly changing categorical context, and how firms can use category strategy to shape markets to their advantage. I use computational “big data” text analytic approaches to capture detailed category maps for thousands of firms in a range of industries.