Josh joined the Cai group in 2019 as a PhD student, after an MSci working with Prof. Thomas Gorochowski at the University of Bristol. During his PhD he combined DNA synthesis, automation, recombinases, and CRISPR-Cas engineering to develop platforms for dissecting complex features of the human genome. His work was conducted in collaboration with Dr Wei Leong Chew at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he spent the final two years of his doctoral studies (2021-2023). Upon completion of his PhD, Josh returned to the Cai Group, focusing his research on human and plant synthetic genomics and chromosome engineering. Josh is currently co-lead of our plant chromosome synthesis project, working with collaborators at the Earlham Institute and John Innes Centre to engineer megabase-scale artificial chromosomes for the delivery of novel traits in crop plants.