Individual Members
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Chris Voigt
Dr. Mouncey joined the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2017 as the fourth Director in its 20-year history. After stints as a senior research scientist in molecular biology at Roche Vitamins, Inc. in New Jersey and DSM Nutritional Products in Switzerland, he joined Dow AgroSciences in Indianapolis in 2008 and served as Bioengineering and Bioprocessing R&D Director and Leader from 2011 onward. There, Mouncey directed a 70-member R&D team that supported the growth of a highly successful natural product insecticide that has since generated hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and significant societal benefit, through isolating, optimizing, and scaling-up of new production strains for commercial manufacturing by fermentation. He also built an integrated and highly effective bioprocessing team comprising high-throughput screening, metabolic engineering, engineering biology, systems biology, enzymology, protein expression, fermentation and analytical capabilities. His team also developed production strains and fermentation processes for other molecules such as a new fungicide, propionic acid and long-chain alcohols, as well as supporting the discovery of new crop traits.
A leader in the field of religious studies with particular scholarly interest in bioethics and Jewish studies, Laurie Zoloth’s research explores religion and ethics, drawing from sources ranging from Biblical and Talmudic texts to postmodern Jewish philosophy, including the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Her scholarship spans the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, social justice in health care, and how science and medicine are taught. She also researches the practices of interreligious dialogue, exploring how religion plays a role in public discussion and policy.
Zoloth is author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books, including Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics and Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought.
Zoloth has been the president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She was the inaugural director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University and director of graduate studies in religious studies at Northwestern. She is an elected member of the Hastings Center and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She is a founding board member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.
Her work on bioethics and health care led her to serve on the NASA Advisory Council, the space agency’s highest civilian advisory board; the International Planetary Protection Committee; the National Recombinant DNA Advisory Board, and the executive committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. She served as chair of the first bioethics advisory board at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute and has testified in front of Congress, the President’s Commission on Bioethics, and state legislatures.
Zoloth began her career as a neonatal nurse working in impoverished communities; she holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of the State of New York. She received a master’s degree in Jewish studies and a doctorate in social ethics from the Graduate Theological Union. Zoloth also holds a master’s degree in English from San Francisco State University.
Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Zoloth served as a Charles McCormick Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, holding appointments in the Department of Religious Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Feinberg School of Medicine. At Northwestern, she was founding director of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and founding director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
She currently serves on the Ethics Advisory Board of NASA; the steering committee of The Engineering Biology Research Committee; on the CDC (Biological Agents Working Group); and on the Ethics Board of the American Heart Association.
Michael Smanski is currently an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics in the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota. He received his BS in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin under the mentorship of Ben Shen. As an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, he worked with Christopher Voigt in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 2014. Throughout his career, Michael has studied and engineered multi-gene systems in bacteria. His group at UMN has developed a new platform for engineering ‘species-like’ barriers to sexual reproduction, and they are currently exploring applications for transgene biocontainment and the control of pest populations. Michael has been a member of EBRC since 2018 and has served on the EBRC Council from 2019-present.
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 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.
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.
Michelle A. O’Malley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2009, where she worked with Prof. Anne Robinson to engineer overproduction of membrane proteins in yeast. O’Malley was a USDA-NIFA postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at MIT and the Broad Institute, where she developed new strategies for cellulosic biofuel production. At UCSB, her research group develops synthetic biology tools to engineer protein synthesis within anaerobes and microbial consortia for sustainable chemical production, bioremediation, and natural product discovery. O’Malley’s research has been featured on NPR’s Science Friday, the BBC Newshour, the LA Times, and several other media outlets. She was named one of the 35 Top Innovators Under 35 in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2015, and is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a DOE Early Career Award, an NSF CAREER award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the ACS BIOT Division Young Investigator Award, the ACS PMSE Division Young Investigator Award, an ACS WCC “Rising Star” Award, and a Hellman Faculty Fellowship.