Sydney Steele

B.S., University of Michigan, 2025

Sydney was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she studied biochemistry and first caught the research bug. During her undergrad and for a year post-grad, she worked in the biophysics lab of Sarah Keane, investigating how RNA-protein interactions regulate microRNA processing. Sydney joined the MacMillan group in August of 2026. Outside of the lab, she enjoys reading novels, winning bar trivia (optimistically), and petting every cat she sees.

Fun Facts

• Sydney’s guilty pleasure is a daily morning pastry and she hopes that America one day adopts European café culture.
• One of Sydney’s favorite activities while home in California is visiting the penguins at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; she is still crestfallen that the waddle didn’t choose to move to New Jersey with her.
• Despite growing up amongst Big Tech in the Silicon Valley, Sydney is a bit of a Luddite and prefers that her personal technology be as dumb as possible.