Colton Harper

Colton Harper is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from Hutchinson, Kansas. Colton is a co-founder and graduate student advisor for the UNL Initialize student organization, a hub for service and professional development for over 50 UNL undergraduate students. Colton also has a strong interest in studying the ethics and societal impacts of emerging technologies. In this direction, Colton is a program chair and grant writer for the Broader Considerations of Technology student group and associate conference organizer of the inaugural 2019 Ethics and Broader Considerations of Technology Conference.Colton’s roots in research began the Freshman year of his undergraduate career where he was a member of the 2016 UNL iGEM team. He continued his research in the MBiTe Lab throughout his undergraduate career through UCARE, REU, and McNair grant funding, and he began his Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Massimiliano Pierobon June 2019. Colton currently holds a research assistantship position in the MBiTe Lab and is a recipient of the Othmer Graduate Fellowship and the McNair Graduate Fellowship. Colton’s research interests are in computational modeling, molecular communication, information theory, and synthetic biology.

Selected Honors and Awards:

• Colton Harper, Massimiliano Pierobon, and Maurizio Magarini, "Estimating Information Exchange Performance of Engineered Cell-to-Cell Molecular Communications: a Computation Approach," in The Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), April 2018.
• Colton Harper, Massimiliano Pierobon, and Maurizio Magarini, ”A Design Process for Molecular Communication Systems Based on Biological Circuits in Cells,” 3rd Workshop on Molecular Communications (MOLCOM), April 2018.

Talks:

• Harper, C., Pierobon, M. (2017, July). "Analyzing Information Exchange of Engineered Communication Between Biological Cells," Oral presentation at the California McNair Scholars Symposium, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California.
• Harper, C., Bierman, M., Dooling, D., Mueller, J., Ninh, P., Schwabauer, B. (2016, October). "Nitrate Reduction in Water Systems by Engineered E. coli. Oral presentation at the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) international conference," Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts.
• Palacios, R. A., Swearer, S. M., Harper, C., & Barker, T. (2017, February). "Hacking Harassment: Building kinder and braver online experiences for youth," Poster presented at the Annual Convention of the National Association of School Psychologists, Chicago, Il.