Anna Duraj-Thatte is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked on protein engineering and directed evolution. She then pursued her postdoctoral research at Harvard University. Her research focuses on designing and developing novel strategies to produce smart engineered living materials by integrating the fields of synthetic biology, materials engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. She was named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors.