About
Leia O'Dell is a preschool teacher turned 2x biohackathon winner, biosecurity researcher, lab manager, and conservation volunteer. After 6 years of loving work in early childhood education, she changed careers and is pursuing her lifelong dream of becoming a biologist, driven by a passion for conservation, ecology, and evolution. With her sights set on the secret powers of fly pupal enzymes, she's become known in the Biopunk Community Lab as the "maggot girl," running experiments on green bottle fly maggot supernatants for potential applications in biosecurity and wound healing technologies. She pours her heart into this work and recently conducted a prize-winning experiment that analyzed the extracellular matrix of the pupal cuticle to uncover the connections between protein composition and aging.
Joined
September 2025
