Monique, while a postdoctoral associate in the Synthetic Neurobiology group at MIT, worked on novel methods of directed evolution. She completed her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at MIT. During her doctoral research, she developed and characterized therapeutic agents for the treatment of cancer, focusing on immuno- and targeted therapies. In the Synthetic Neurobiology group, she applied her protein engineering background to the development of novel tools for the study and understanding of the brain. She then joined a startup company in the cancer therapeutics space.