We engineer biological cells as catalysts to facilitate the conversion of renewable resources to useful chemicals such as fuels, industrial commodities, and pharmaceutical compounds. The specific projects are multidisciplinary in nature and focus on the following directions:

•Exploring new biological platforms to utilize diverse renewable carbon sources (such as carbon dioxide) and energy sources (such as light and electricity).

•Using synthetic biology and protein engineering tools to enable the construction of unnatural metabolic pathways.

•Studying and optimizing biosynthetic networks using fundamental design principles and methods in metabolic engineering and biochemistry.

•Developing universal synthetic biological parts and enzymatic technologies which can be applied to a broad range of metabolic engineering problems.