JL Clem Fortman

Clem Fortman

J. L. “Clem” Fortman is a synthetic biologist with a long standing interest in biodefense. He is currently a staff member at the EBRC, and was formerly a technical analyst for synthetic biology with ANSER providing support to the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical and Biological Defense, where he previously served two years as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow. He is also a former Fellow with the Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security. Clem is a classically trained microbial physiologist with a PhD in microbiology from the University of Minnesota. He spent 6 years as a postdoc in the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) Department of Chemical Engineering where he gained his expertise in synthetic biology. He is a founder of the introductory College-Level Experience in Microbiology (iCLEM) program at UCB, an educational outreach program for under resourced high school students, as well as Lygos, a San Francisco Bay area synthetic biology company. His career in biodefense was stimulated by his time as an enlisted man in the US Army where he served in a number of different roles including assistant Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Non-Commissioned Officer for the Headquarters and Service Battery of the 1st Battalion 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment.

Elizabeth Sattely

Howard Salis

Prof. Howard Salis is an Associate Professor at Penn State University where his research lab focuses on the development & experimental validation of predictive biophysical models & design algorithms for rationally engineering synthetic organisms. Thousands of researchers have utilized these models & algorithms to design hundreds of thousands of synthetic DNA sequences for a wide variety of biotech applications. Prof. Salis received his Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. He received the DARPA Young Faculty and the NSF Career Award. He is also the founder of a spin-off company, De Novo DNA, that has developed a web-based design platform for engineering organisms.

Kristala Prather

Kristala L. J. Prather is the Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She received an S.B. degree from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1999), and worked 4 years in BioProcess Research and Development at the Merck Research Labs prior to joining the faculty of MIT. Her research interests are centered on the design and assembly of recombinant microorganisms for the production of small molecules. Prather is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions; she has co-authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and given more than 140 invited presentations.

Pamela Peralta-Yahya

Dr. Peralta-Yahya’s diverse research group works in the area of engineering biology, drawing from principles of chemistry, biochemistry and chemical engineering to build systems for chemical detection and production. Her group focuses on the development of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)-based sensors for biotechnology and biomedical applications, and the engineering of biological systems for the production of advanced biofuels and modified natural products. Early on, her work was recognized with several awards including a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DuPont Young Professor Award, a Kavli Fellowship, and an NIH MIRA award. Her group’s key accomplishments are 1) the standardization of GPCR-based sensors in yeast to reduce the cost and accelerate the pace of drug discovery for these receptors, which are the target of over 30% of FDA approved drugs, and 2) the development of advanced biofuels, including pinene, which, when dimerized, has sufficient energy content to power rockets and missiles. Today, her group is funded to work on these and other cutting edge areas – including how to power a rocket returning from Mars and how to make synthetic cells learn without evolution – by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

Richard Murray

Richard M. Murray received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray’s research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in biology and autonomy. Current projects include analysis and design of biomolecular feedback circuits, synthesis of discrete decision-making protocols for reactive systems, and design of highly resilient architectures for autonomous systems.

Chang Liu

Professor Liu’s research is in the fields of synthetic biology, chemical biology, and directed evolution. He is particularly interested in engineering specialized genetic systems for rapid mutation and evolution in vivo to address problems ranging from protein engineering to developmental biology. For his group’s work, Professor Liu has been recognized with a number of awards including the NIH Transformative Research Award, the NIH New Innovator Award, the Moore Inventor Fellowship, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Dupont Young Professor Award, and the ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award.

Ahmad Khalil

Ahmad (Mo) Khalil is Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Founding Associate Director of the Biological Design Center at Boston University. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His research is interested in how molecular circuits enable core cellular functions, such as decision-making, computation, and epigenetic memory. His team applies synthetic biology approaches to interrogate the function and evolution of these cellular systems. He is recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NIH New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the Hartwell Foundation Biomedical Research Award, and he has received numerous awards for teaching excellence at both the Department and College levels. Mo was an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. James Collins at Boston University. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT and his B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Stanford University

Michael Jewett

Michael Jewett is a Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He received his B.S. from UCLA and PhD from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering. He completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard Medical School. Jewett was also a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). His research group focuses on advancing synthetic biology research to support planet and societal health, with applications in medicine, manufacturing, sustainability, and education.

John Glass

John Glass

Dr. John Glass is a Professor and leader of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) Synthetic Biology and Bioenergy Group. His expertise is in molecular biology, microbial pathogenesis, RNA virology, and microbial genomics. Glass is part of the Venter Institute team that created the first bacterial cell with a chemically synthesized genome and a bacterial cell with a synthetic genome encoding only the essential gene set needed for life. In reaching this milestone the Venter Institute scientists developed the fundamental techniques of the new field of synthetic genomics including genome transplantation and genome assembly. Glass was also leader of the JCVI project that rapidly made synthetic influenza virus vaccine strains in collaboration with Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Inc. and Synthetic Genomics, Inc. At the JCVI he has also led the bacterial outer membrane vesicle based vaccine, genome transplantation, and Mycoplasma genitalium minimal genome projects, and projects studying other mycoplasma and ureaplasma species. Glass and his Venter Institute colleagues are now using synthetic biology and synthetic genomics approaches developed at the JCVI to create cells and organelles with redesigned genomes to make microbes that can produce biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and industrially valuable molecules. Glass is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Maryland at College Park Cellular and Molecular Biology Program, one of the founding members of the Build-A-Cell program to create synthetic cells, and member of the Global Viral Network Scientific Leadership Board.

Prior to joining the JCVI, Glass spent five years in the Infectious Diseases Research Division of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. There he was a member of the hepatitis C virology group and a microbial genomics group (1998-2003). There Glass was part of the Lilly and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. team that developed Incivek, one of the first drugs to cure hepatitis C virus.
Glass earned his undergraduate (Biology) and graduate degrees (Genetics) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Ph.D. work was on RNA virus genetics in the laboratory of Gail Wertz. He was on the faculty and did postdoctoral fellowships in the Microbiology Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham in polio virology with Casey Morrow and mycoplasma pathogenesis with Gail Cassell (1990-1998). On sabbatical leave in Ellson Chen’s lab at Applied Biosystems, Inc. (1995-1997) he sequenced the genome of Ureaplasma parvum and began his study of bacterial genomics.

Emma Frow

Emma’s research and teaching activities focus on the governance of emerging biotechnologies, especially synthetic biology and biological engineering. She started her research life as a bioscientist, completing a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, and then re-trained in the field of science & technology studies (STS) at the University of Edinburgh and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her current faculty position at Arizona State University is a joint appointment between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Biological & Health Systems Engineering, which allows her to straddle the worlds of science policy and bioengineering. Emma has been studying the field of synthetic biology for a decade now, working on a variety of social scientific and interdisciplinary projects in Europe and the US. She has specific research interests in the relationship between engineering and biology, and in the standards and infrastructures (physical, digital, social) being designed to support the development of this field. She sees standards and infrastructures as tools of governance, and is interested in identifying the values, design choices and visions of the future that get built into new infrastructures for biotechnology.

Andrew Ellington

The Ellington lab works on using synthetic biology to augment organismal chemistry, generating expanded genetic alphabets and genetic codes. In addition, we attempt to developing orthogonal control systems for a variety of organisms that allow us to readily lay in new instruction sets that can operate on top of normal metabolism. Between these innovations, it has proven possible to develop and produce novel biomaterials, with the ultimate goal of being able to direct the evolution of materials properties.

Mary Dunlop

Mary Dunlop is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University with additional appointments in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry and Bioinformatics. She graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a minor in Computer Science. She then received her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, where she studied synthetic biology with a focus on dynamics and feedback in gene regulation. As a postdoctoral scholar, she conducted research on biofuel production at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute. Her lab engineers novel synthetic feedback control systems and also studies naturally occurring examples of feedback in gene regulation. In recognition of her outstanding research and service contributions, she has received many honors including a Department of Energy Early Career Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the ACS Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award.

Maitreya Dunham

The Dunham lab uses synthetic biology, evolution, and genomics to understand how genome variation works in yeast and humans. In service of this goal, we also build tools, both physical devices for continuous culture and DNA gadgets for yeast genetics.

Lydia Contreras

Dr. Lydia M. Contreras is an Associate Professor (and Laurence E. McMakin, Jr. Centennial Fellow) of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin; she is also a member of the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology. She teaches Introduction to Chemical Engineering Computing, Thermodynamics, Introduction to Chemical Engineering Analysis, and Fundamental and Applications of Cellular Regulation. Dr. Contreras obtained a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, where she graduated Cum Laude. She completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University, focusing on engineering bacterial cells for improved production of therapeutic proteins. As a postdoctoral associate at the Wadsworth Center (New York State Department of Health), she focused on understanding mechanisms of infection in pathogenic bacteria. She began her career at the University of Texas-Austin in 2011, where she leads a research team focused on RNA biochemistry to study gene regulation mechanisms associated with stress-responses for applications in health and biotechnology. She has received several academic, teaching and service awards including: Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang Award, Department of Thrust Reduction Agency (DTRA) Young Investigator, Airforce Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator, NSF CAREER, Health and Environmental Institute (HEI) Walter E. Rosenblith New Investigator, Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program (NHARP) Early Career, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Young Investigator Award, and an Innovative Early-Career Frontiers of Engineering Educator. She lives in Austin, Tx with her husband Chris and is a proud mom to boy-girl twins.

James Carothers

The Carothers Research Group at the University of Washington creates design-driven approaches for synthetic biology that integrate quantitative RNA aptamer device design, dynamic control system modeling, and CRISPR-Cas network engineering to investigate questions about biological design and develop technologies for bio-based chemical synthesis. Previously, Carothers was a postdoctoral fellow with pioneering synthetic biologist Jay D. Keasling at UC Berkeley. Carothers earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University with Nobel Prize winner Jack W. Szostak. He has a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale. His work has been recognized by the UW Presidential Innovation Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and supported by the NSF, DOE and private industry. He has been awarded the UW College of Engineering Junior Faculty Award and is a Dan Evans Career Development Professor.

Virginia Ursin

Ute Galm

Ute Galm is a molecular microbiologist with 10+ years of experience in strain engineering, synthetic biology, and industrial biotechnology and is the Vice President of Enzyme and Strain Development at Curie Co. After more than a decade in R&D and product development, Ute believes it is critical to wisely use what nature provides to us in the development of sustainable solutions to protect humanity and to preserve our planet. Before joining Curie Co, Ute was an Associate Director at Zymergen, a company that integrates automation, machine learning, and genomics to rapidly accelerate the pace of scientific advancement. Prior to joining Zymergen, Ute worked as a scientist and group leader at Dow AgroSciences on the development of fermentation derived insecticide and fungicide products. She graduated from the University of Tuebingen, Germany with a PhD degree in Pharmaceutical Biology and received her postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Ute is passionate about all aspects of using biology to develop sustainable solutions for human health and other market applications. Ute can be reached at ute.galm@curieco.com.

James Diggans

James Diggans is Director, Data Science and Biosecurity for Twist Bioscience, a DNA synthesis company based in San Francisco, CA. He holds a PhD from George Mason University in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and has worked in target discovery, molecular diagnostic development and biodefense including five years leading the computational biology group at the MITRE Corporation. His research has included methods for efficient detection of biological weapons release, machine learning-based cancer diagnosis, and novel algorithmic approaches to discerning intent in oligonucleotide-length DNA synthesis requests. At Twist, his group builds cloud-based bioinformatics systems for effective biosecurity screening and analysis of next generation sequencing data to power silicon-based DNA synthesis at record scale.

Mark Styczynski

Mark received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 2007. He also did postdoctoral work at the Broad Institute from 2007-2009. At Georgia Tech, Mark’s work spans synthetic and systems biology, and often includes work at the intersection of those two fields. His main Engineering Biology focus is on the development of low-cost, low-resource diagnostics.

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