Team Bio

Cellsius came together as a group of individuals seeking a true community bio laboratory for project-based learning, events and classes as well as an opportunity to make change in the San Francisco area. The members of the lab range in experience from synthetic biology to robotics to organic chemistry, neurology, tissue engineering, DNA sequencing and more. We're deeply excited to build an open and accessible community for experimentation and discovery.

Elliot Roth

Elliot is the head of strategic partnerships and venture portfolio in the agriculture group at Deep Science Ventures, and former founder of Spira, a company that creates carbon-negative materials from engineered algae grown by a global network of farms.

Previously Elliot helped establish IndieLab RVA, a community lab in Richmond, Virginia, and led a coalition of 5 community labs sharing knowledge and expertise in Virginia. He worked as a consultant with Betabox Labs establishing educational programming in a mobile makerspace, and built out the CrabLab in Los Angeles, a community laboratory in a shipping container as well as the Biopunk Society.

He is a Future Founders and Halcyon Fellow, holds a degree in biomedical engineering; previously started 7 companies, 2 nonprofits, studied synthetic biology for 12 years and worked for 5 years as a product consultant. He is incredibly motivated to solve physiological needs using simple biological design and enabling access to the tools of biotechnology. In his spare time he plays music, and participates in space analog missions while residing in San Francisco.

Jesse Schmidt

Jesse is a researcher with a neuroscience background now focused on applied AI and brain organoids. She received her BSc in Behavioral & Cognitive Neuroscience and Master of International Business from the University of Florida, researching addiction basic neurobiology and psychopharmacology in stimulants and psychedelic therapeutics before venturing into fine-tuning AI for applications in mental health and therapy startups. She is currently working on AI voice wearables for neurophenomenology research while also conducting research in mushroom tryptamine biochemistry. She's particularly interested in the future of bioengineering and applying AI and knowledge graphing to bridge insights between scientific fields to apply testable hypotheses to organoids. She is always open to new challenges and ideas and does a lot of traveling in her spare time (60+ countries), bringing a global perspective to enrich her work.

Ryan Berg

Ryan previously worked at Caterpillar servicing mining, oil, constuction along with several government contracts for waste collection and military refurbishments covering Washington, Alaska and parts of Montana and Idaho. He then moved into medicine at 23andMe Therapeutics managing laboratory operations for immuno-oncology, protein / antibody engineering and functional genomics. He now works at Ultragenyx in rare disease medicine and is looking to enable informal and project based learning through community based biology labs.

Kelsey Pool

Kelsey is a robotics engineer specializing in cell and gene therapy. With a MS/BS degree in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, she applies her expertise in robotics, optics, and hardware engineering to enhance biomedical systems. Currently, Kelsey works at Multiply Labs, where she designs large-scale instrumentation systems for robotic automation, focusing on creating advanced cell and gene therapies. Previously, she developed blood processing devices and minimally invasive surgical tools at companies like Terumo and Bolder Surgical.

Outside of work, Kelsey is interested in using the Engineering skillset to give back to the broader community. She helped start Cellsius and currently leads Bright Block, a project aimed at enhancing safe bike lane infrastructure in San Francisco.