Project Leader The Wet Lab

David Forney, Ph. D.

David leads two Research Projects at the Wet Lab: Salton Sea Bird Ecology, and Data Science for Democracy. In addition to those projects, David leads the curation of Wet Labs website, brand, and business model and is also the former Wet Lab outreach coordinator.

David completed his doctoral work at MIT, where he studied the carbon cycle and respiration kinetics of microbial communities in soils and marine sediment. He has 4 years of experience as a data scientist at a San Diego tech company. He is working with the wet lab in order to create a novel platform to create, share, and collaborate on new ideas, and promote pragmatic, critical scientific discussion.

Callen Hyland, Ph. D.

Callen is a co-founder and board member of The Wet Lab, and organizes our hands-on biotech workshops. She is also the Lead researcher on the La Jolla Cove Microbial Diversity Project, and hopes to encourage the public to make scientific discovery a part of everyday life. Callen has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology, from Yale University, where she studied the biomechanics of neuronal regeneration. As a post-doctoral fellow at University of Californica, San Diego, she studied Hydra regeneration. She currently works as a life science consultant.