From NASA Scientist to Biotech Entrepreneur

Dr. Kristina Fontanez is passionate about building cutting-edge tools for biology. Throughout her career, she has worked at the intersection of biology, engineering, and computer science to enable new scientific discoveries. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Princeton University and obtained her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. At Harvard, she studied symbiotic life in the deep ocean and worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At NASA, Dr. Fontanez developed new tools for sampling biology in the deep sea and developed procedures for biological sample return from Mars. Dr. Fontanez received a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Health to study microbial oceanography at MIT. During this fellowship, she spent several months at sea doing fieldwork. After this training, Dr. Fontanez entered the industry where she worked for several leading biotech companies including Qiagen and Bio-Rad. Most recently, Dr. Fontanez co-founded Fluent BioSciences, which developed precision tools for biology. Fluent BioSciences was successfully sold to Illumina in 2024 and Dr. Fontanez now works at Illumina developing new technologies for single-cell gene expression.