Karl Romanowicz is a Principal Scientist at SynPlexity and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Plesa Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Oregon. His talk will highlight work recently published in Science Advances, where he and colleagues developed large-scale synthetic gene libraries and applied broad mutational scanning to decode variant effects in dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), revealing how sequence variation drives antibiotic resistance across the protein family. He holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan, with broad expertise across microbial ecology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics.