David Nielsen

My research has been in the area of biotechnology for 18 years, the last 13 of which has been focussed on metabolic engineering as well as synthetic biology. We are interested in developing novel pathways and strains for the bioproduction of value added chemicals, as well as new tools for improving such efforts. Current projects are focussed on engineering new pathways for non-natural aromatic chemicals, application of rational engineering and adaptive laboratory evolution to improve strain tolerance, engineering cyanobacteria for the photosynthetic production of biofuels and biochemicals, development of tools for genetic engineering in cyanobacteria (e.g., new plasmids and promoter systems, CRIPSR-based gene editing tools, markerless recombineering methods, etc.), and the engineering of and investigation of synthetic microbial communities.