Nikhil U. Nair received his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) in 2003, after which he had a brief stint at Bristol-Myers Squibb where he worked as a manufacturing research scientist in biotechnology purification development. He then went on to receive his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2006 and 2010, respectively. As a graduate student, he developed processes for the production of the sugar substitute xylitol using E. coli and the biofuel butanol using yeast via a combination of protein and genome engineering approaches. He joins Tufts after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Microbiology and Immunobiology at the Harvard Medical School under the guidance of Ann Hochschild.