Response to RFI on Future Topics for Workforce Development in Emerging Technology Career Pathways

Publication Date: June 2023

Response submitted by EBRC Director of Roadmapping and Education, Dr. Emily Aurand, to the request by NSF seeking novel approaches that lead to the recruitment of diverse and creative individuals into emerging technologies. This response provides strategic recommendations to increase the rate and composition of students enrolled in both traditional and non-traditional academic pathways to STEM and high-paying technology careers.

 

Keywords: Emerging technologies, Workforce, Biotechnology, Education

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Vikramaditya Yadav

Dr. Vikramaditya G. Yadav is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he directs Canada’s premier program in Sustainable Process Engineering. He has made notable contributions to research, education, commercialization and regulation of synthetic biology and environmental biotechnology. Dr. Yadav also founded Metabolik Technologies Inc., which was acquired by Allonnia, a Bill Gates-backed company, and is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Tersa Earth Innovations, a mining biotechnology company. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of React Zero Carbon, a venture catalyst and capital fund for net zero solutions, and Hilo Bio, a performance biomaterials company. He was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2021 and received UBC’s highest teaching accolade, the Killam Prize, in 2023.

Keith Tyo

Keith E.J. Tyo is associate professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Microbiology and Immunology at Northwestern University and founding member of the Center for Synthetic Biology. Keith received his undergraduate degree from West Virginia University, PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a NIH National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow at Chalmers University, Sweden.

Keith’s research interests are at the intersection of Synthetic Biology, Sustainability, and Global Health. His group is focused on understanding and engineering microbial metabolism to make fuels and chemicals from renewable and waste carbon sources. His group uses genetics, metabolomics, and computational tools to guide these efforts. His second focus is on engineering protein-based biosensors that enable low-cost, point-of-care detection of important clinical biomarkers in impoverished, rural settings. His work has been published in Science and Nature Biotechnology, and has been received the NSF CAREER award.

Milan Mrksich

Robert Ziman

Robert is a research software engineer with a decade of experience supporting bioinformatics and computational biology projects in both academia and industry. He was a bioinformatics programmer at The Centre for Applied Genomics in Toronto, a bioinformatics associate at Genentech in South San Francisco, and a research associate in the Cohen Lab for Aging, Systems, and Statistics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. He co-founded and co-hosted the Longevity Biotech Show podcast and has been observing the longevity biotech scene since the early 2000s. Robert holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.