Rate My Professor Niles Pierce

Pierce's research centers on biological engineering, chemical engineering, computational mathematics, molecular programming, chemical biology, and synthetic biology. He engineers small conditional DNAs and RNAs for signal transduction in vitro, in situ, and in vivo, and develops computational algorithms for nucleic acid system analysis and design to create programmable molecular instruments for cell state readout and regulation. As a co-founder of dynamic nucleic acid nanotechnology and molecular programming, his lab's hybridization chain reaction (HCR) platform for multiplexed, quantitative bioimaging and NUPACK software suite for nucleic acid analysis and design are utilized by thousands worldwide. Key publications include "Triggered amplification by hybridization chain reaction" (2004), "A synthetic DNA walker for molecular transport" (2004), "Thermodynamic analysis of interacting nucleic acid strands" (2007), "Programming biomolecular self-assembly pathways" (2008), "NUPACK: Analysis and design of nucleic acid systems" (2011), "Multiplexed miRNA northern blots via hybridization chain reaction" (2016), and "High-performance allosteric conditional guide RNAs for mammalian cell-selective regulation of CRISPR/Cas" (2021). His honors encompass the Rhodes Scholarship and Hertz and NSF Fellowships (1993), NSF CAREER Award (2005), Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2003), Guggenheim Fellowship (2014–2015), Rozenberg Tulip Award (2020), and Eastman Professorship at Oxford (2016–2017).