Dr. Sheena N. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Biotechnology at Nanyang Technological University Singapore where she leads an academic group in engineering next-generation gene therapy vectors for precision in vivo delivery. Her research integrates protein engineering and synthetic biology to create programmable virus-like particles (VLPs) for oncology and neurological diseases. She is a co-inventor of SHREAD (SHielded, REtargeted ADenovirus), a modular system for targeted delivery and in situ production of therapeutic biologics. Before returning to academia, she was a founding executive at Swiss biotechnology company where she helped translate SHREAD from academic discovery into an industrial therapeutic platform. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and completed her postdoctoral training at the University