Seung Hwan “Allen” Lee is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Ray D. & Mary T. Johnson/Mayon Plastics Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His passion for engineering microorganisms to enable sustainable energy and chemical production began during his undergraduate research at UCLA under Prof. James Liao. After completing his undergraduate studies, he earned his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Rice University, where he worked under the guidance of Prof. Ramon Gonzalez. His undergraduate and doctoral research focused on the efficient biological utilization of one-carbon (C1) compounds through engineering native and synthetic metabolic pathways. As one of the co-inventors of the Formyl-CoA Elongation (FORCE) pathways, he helped develop a novel approach for converting C1 feedstock into value-added small molecules. During his postdoc under the guidance of Prof. Greg Stephanopoulos at MIT, he has expanded his research to include engineering non-model organisms, leveraging their inherent abilities to efficiently utilize C1 and C2 feedstocks. Beyond his research, Allen is actively engaged in biotechnology and climate technology communities, participating in organizations such as the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB), the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC), and the MIT Energy Conference.

Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro is a Professor at Imperial College London, where he leads a research group working on Engineering Biology and sustainability. He is the director of the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins and the Microbial Food Hub. His research focuses on the use of microorganisms to convert renewable feedstocks into valuable products (such as food ingredients). He has published over 200 articles, most on topics related to microbial bioproduction (precision, biomass and traditional fermentation).
Rodrigo obtained his PhD at the University of Salamanca (Spain). Before joining Imperial, he carried out his postdoctoral research at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE, France). He has been a visiting researcher at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and AIST (Japan).