Kristen Tran is the Head of Automation Strategy at Ginkgo Bioworks and joined the company in 2015 as one of the first automation engineers. Kristen has been an individual contributor and technical leader in building Ginkgo’s automation capabilities across multiple automation systems. Today, she and the team continue to work to increase the scale, flexibility, and quality of automation at Ginkgo to make biology easier to engineer. Kristen started her career at Merck, deploying automation in the pharmaceutical industry for sample management and high-throughput screening. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University.