Kevin Mc Farland
About Kevin Mc Farland
I am a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Dept. and part of the AstraZeneca Scholars program (https://pdco.med.jhmi.edu/jhazs/), which combines a traditional Ph.D. with industrially-relevant biopharmaceutical research. My research focuses on characterizing cellular redox in bioprocesses by engineering intracellular fluorescent sensors into cell lines. My work combines cell line engineering (western blots, mammalian transfection, DNA/plasmid cloning), live-cell assays (flow cytometry, spectrophotometric assays, microscopy), and bench-scale bioprocesses (3L bioreactor, shake flasks) to investigate how redox impacts therapeutics quality and production. I also conduct bioinformatic research, using nanopore sequencing data to explore the genetic and epigenetic stability of mammalian production cell lines in long-term cultures. This computational work requires using Python, R, and command-line tools in a Linux-based high-performance cluster. Previous computational work I have done includes developing models of cellular metabolism in MATLAB. I have had the privilege of living and working in multiple countries across the Americas, and I speak English and Spanish natively.