Ilenne D. Del Valle Kessra

Ilenne Del Valle is an R&D Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Chile and her Ph.D. in Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology from Rice University. In her graduate work, she developed biosensors to understand plant-microbe and microbe-microbe communication in soils and how soils’ physicochemical properties can affect this communication. She then took a postdoctoral researcher position in the Eckert lab at ORNL, developing genetic tools for CRISPR applications in non-model Gram-positive bacteria. 
Dr. Del Valle’s research focuses on engineering new synthetic biology tools to facilitate ecosystem engineering, specifically focusing on environmental, energy, and sustainability applications.