Malik George

Malik George is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Woodbridge, New Jersey. He is studying Biological Engineering with an African and African Diaspora Studies minor. At school, he has done worked at several bioengineering labs with research ranging from immunology to neuroethics. After undergrad, he hopes to attend graduate school for a PhD with a focus in synthetic biology.

Research Area

Malik is working in the Mitra Lab to research how transcription is regulated in yeast. Regulating transcription is essential for proper gene expression, the driving force behind many cellular processes. Gene activation is controlled by regulatory proteins known as transcription factors, which recognize and bind specific regions of DNA to promote or inhibit protein synthesis. Transcription factors have been found to bind to different regions of DNA in living organisms than in previous molecular experiments and computational models. Malik is mapping the in vivo binding of 12 of these proteins to better understand how cooperative binding complexes can affect ​genomic​ binding patterns.