My name is Niko McCarty. I'm a bioengineer, writer, and researcher. My favorite thing to do is help others found things in biotechnology: Companies, magazines, nonprofits, and so on. If I can ever be helpful to you, please email or text.

Current: Fellow at Astera Institute.

Previous: Founding editor of Asimov Press. Head of Creative at Asimov. Head of Media at New Science. Data Journalist at Simons Foundation.

From 2023 to 2025, I worked at MIT with Chris Voigt on a philanthropically-funded project to design a new Department of Genetic Engineering — the argument being that genetic engineering currently has no intellectual home and is instead siloed across historical divisions, such as Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and the agrosciences. As part of the work, I traveled to more than a dozen countries to study biotechnology training programs and interviewed 100+ company scientists and CEOs. The final reports — a roadmap and two appendices — are published on MIT DSpace.

School: MS in Bioengineering from Caltech (PhD dropout), MRes in Synthetic Biology from Imperial College London, MA in Science Journalism from New York University, BS in Biochemistry from University of Iowa.

Email: nsmccarty3 [at] gmail.com

Awards: Vox Future Perfect 50 / Forbes 30 Under 30 / Fulbright Scholar / Goldwater Scholar

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