About
Oliver Medvedik is presently the Sandholm Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology and Bioengineering at The Cooper Union and Assistant Director of the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering.
He received his bachelor's degree in biology from Hunter College, City University of New York, where, as an undergraduate, he worked at the immunology laboratory of Dr. Laurel Eckhardt studying B-cell development. He later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, in the Biomedical and Biological Sciences program. While performing his doctoral research at the laboratory of Dr. David A, Sinclair, he used single-celled budding yeast as a model system to map genetic pathways that regulate longevity.
Since then he has worked as a biotechnology consultant at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and has also taught molecular biology to numerous undergraduate and graduate students while at Harvard University, The Cooper Union, School of Visual Arts and NYU. He has also instructed five different undergraduate teams for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) from 2009-2014. This year, he is proud to be once again leading the Cooper Union iGEM team.
He is also the co-founder of the community biotechnology laboratory, Genspace, located in Brooklyn, where he continues to serve on it's board of directors and is the Director of Science. A first of its kind, it is an open biotechnology laboratory that enables individuals, unaffiliated with any institution, to use the tools of biotechnology in a shared, co-working, biosafety level one laboratory space, on various biotech projects.