Nate completed undergraduate majors in biomedical engineering, biology, biochemistry, microbiology, and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. He received his masters in 2013 and his PhD in 2017 from Stanford University where he was a member of the Quake lab. He has worked on projects involving microbiology, microfluidic devices, community ecology, capillarity and wetting, and network theory. He was an Evans Scholar, NSF GRFP Recipient, and a Siebel Scholar. He started the Cira lab as a Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute in late 2017 and as an assistant professor in Cornell University’s Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering in 2021. ​

The Cira Lab is developing technologies to enable new scales of experimental throughput and using them to untangle complex biological systems. Many biological systems involve the interaction of large numbers of different components, and many of biology’s most pressing questions involve understanding properties that emerge out of this complexity. These questions include, “How do combinations of different microbial species result in community stability?”, “How do different genetic variants combine to give resistance or susceptibility to disease?”, and “How do RNA expression levels give rise to different cell types?”. Answering questions like these will require numbers of experiments commensurate with the complexity of the systems being studied.