Héctor García Martín

Synthetic biology and Artificial Intelligence to engineer cells

I am a scientist in Berkeley Lab working on bioengineering cells to produce biofuels, therapeutic drugs and other bioproducts for the benefit of society.

I leverage machine learning, synthetic biology and automation to make biology predictable, as the founder of Berkeley Lab's Quantitative Metabolic Modeling group,  and Director for JBEI's Data Science and Modeling at the Biofuels and Bioproducts Division.  

A physicist working in synthetic biology

How did I get here?

I started my Ph. D. in condensed matter physics, but very early on became fascinated by emergent properties in biology, like e.g. the species area rule. Hence, I decided to work on metagenomics for my postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute, obtaining blueprints of microbial community metabolism. Irked by the difficulty of creating predictive models for microbial communities, I focused on an easier target: pure cultures for which we have the tools to change their genome. This took me to my current position, developing predictive models for biological systems to produce biofuels and other products. You can read the expanded version of this story here, or an even more expanded here.