I am interested in plant secondary metabolism, metabolic engineering, and plant molecular farming. Currently I am focusing on revealing carotenoid biosynthesis using tomato and Arabidopsis as model systems and multiple vitamin biofortification in seeds using synthetic biology and genetic engineering methods. Another research topic of my lab is using plant system to produce therapeutic proteins.

Ambassador (ret) Robert P. Mikulak is an independent expert on chemical and biological security issues. Until mid-December 2025, he served as an expert on these issues at the United States Department of State, focusing on measures for strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention, ensuring that advances in biology are not used to create new biological weapons, and investigation of alleged use of chemical or biological weapons. He is also an expert consultant for the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs.
From November 2010 until his retirement in July 2015, Ambassador Mikulak was the United States Permanent Representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). He previously served in the State Department and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in a series of increasingly responsible technical and policy positions related to prohibition of chemical and biological weapons. During the decade-long negotiation of the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention, he was the deputy U.S. negotiator and senior U.S. expert.
Ambassador Mikulak was awarded the OPCW-The Hague Award in 2019 for outstanding contributions toward a world free of chemical weapons. Other honors include high-level awards from the Secretaries of State and Defense and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ambassador Mikulak received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did post-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Allen Liu received a B.Sc. degree in Biochemistry (Honors) from the University of British Columbia in 2001. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 2007 from the University of California-Berkeley and received his post-doctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute-La Jolla. He started his group in 2012, and he is currently the Associate Chair for Graduate Education and a Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Biophysics at the University of Michigan. His current research interests lie in cellular mechanotransduction and bottom-up synthetic biology, and his lab uses tools from quantitative cell biology, synthetic biology, biophysics, and microfluidics. He has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Young Innovator by Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE), a Rising Star from CMBE-Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and was named a Future of Biophysics Burroughs Wellcome Fund Symposium speaker. He is an elected Fellow of the BMES, and a recipient of the Endeavour Executive Fellowship (Australia) and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researcher (Germany)

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).

I am a metabolic engineer and systems biologist with research interests primarily focused on finding/developing novel biological pathways for waste upcycling. My group does “full stack” metabolic engineering, from in silico modelling and design through to bench-scale fermentation to evaluate scalability. I am also the co-founder of Phycus Biotechnologies, which makes bio-based glycolic acid using a novel, sustainable fermentation process.

Dr. Alberto J. Donayre-Torres is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima, Peru. He holds a Ph.D. in Plant Genetics and Biotechnology from CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico (2009), and completed postdoctoral training at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Colorado State University (USA), where he spent five years advancing synthetic biology platforms for programmable biological systems. His research sits at the convergence of synthetic biology, advancing biomaterials using bioconjugation engineering (ACS Omega, 2025). He leads projects developing open-source tools for DNA assembly (pyBrick-DNA, J. Comp. Biol., 2023) and develops international collaboration on predictive biomaterial modeling AI-assisted. Dr. Donayre has supervised undergraduate and graduate research in recombinant protein synthesis, hydrogel functionalization, and bioconjugation — and actively contributes to the global synthetic biology community as co-organizer of international congresses and developer of open bioengineering platforms.

Joy Y. Zhang is a Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice (GSEJ) at the University of Kent. Her research examines evolving science–society dynamics and their implications for the global ethical governance of emerging life sciences. Conceptually, her work advances the theorisation of cosmopolitanisation, decolonisation, commoning, epistemic justice, and subaltern politics. Empirically, her research focuses on four major scientific powers—China, India, the UK, and the US. She has studied the governance and science diplomacy of emerging life sciences—including stem cells, synthetic biology, genome editing, and experimental therapies—alongside climate politics, food movements, and environmental engineering. She currently leads three cutting-edge social research programmes on engineering biology and its applications in critical minerals, biomedicine, and agriculture, with the aim of informing social and policy deliberation in the UK and internationally. She is the author of three academic books and publishes widely in high-impact journals across the natural and social sciences. She is frequently interviewed by global media and advises leading research and policy institutions in Europe and Asia.