Research Interests The mission of the lab is to use biotechnology to address important problems in sustainable energy, the environment, industry and human health. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering are rapidly expanding fields of bioengineering that involve the development of biological pathways, systems, or organisms with synthetic biological behaviors (analogous to synthetic chemistry being the design of series of chemical reactions to produce synthetic molecules). We are interested in engineering microorganisms with new desirable traits of environmental, industrial, and medical importance. The scale of our bioengineering efforts spans microbial consortia, cellular engineering, organelle engineering, and protein engineering (Figure 1).