Lasana Power

With the hope of impacting climate change, Lasana attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and earned a bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Environmental Science. He took summers to work various internships in the oil industry: as a Technical Services intern at Marathon Oil he updated process diagrams with field verification; as a Process Control intern at ExxonMobil he created test simulations for operators to reduce emergency response times. Lasana earned a master’s in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. In graduate school he discovered a love for microbiology and began pursuing the potential of microorganisms to disrupt less sustainable industries. At Stanford, he worked in the Alfred Spormann Lab deploying CRISPRi to encourage a methanogen to produce higher-order carbon compounds. He also worked in the Craig Criddle lab to study enhanced phosphorus storage under feast-famine cycling, as seen in activated sludge from the East Bay Municipal Utility District.