Our Research
Bioprocess engineering enabled by synthetic biology
Climate change calls for urgent innovations in sustainability that are useful across geographies and economies and can operate at scale. The ability to sequester and degrade pollutants through biological processes will significantly impact all industries, people, and the planet.
We integrate synthetic biology and bioprocess engineering by mixing cell-free systems, metabolic engineering, artificial intelligence, and additive manufacturing to:
New Enzymes
Explore natural proteins and create new-to-nature enzymes.
Biohybrids
Combine biological and chemical systems in new ways.
Bioprocesses
Enable carbon-optimized bioremediation and bioproduction.
Our lab operates across the molecular, system, and process scales to enable novel bioprocesses for climate change mitigation and adaptation. These scales build on a body of work in pathway prototyping and enzyme discovery, informing cellular pathway and strain design, studying physiochemical impacts on enzymatic cascades, and developing high-throughput, machine-learning aided engineering—working together to address scientific and technological gaps in engineering biology for sustainability. We have projects in the lab focused on increasing our ability to biorecover from waste, biorecycle waste materials, and biocapture waste carbon.
Biorecover
We are engineering bioprocesses for selective biomining from waste.
Biorecycle
We are building enzymatic cascades for on-demand mixed waste processing.
Biocapture
We are creating biosystems to transform carbon from the atmosphere.
Check out our latest publications
With support from
LOOKING TO JOIN OUR TEAM?
We are looking for creative and curious graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates that are interested exploring the interface between biological and chemical systems.