The EUSynBioS Symposium 2020 is going online!

Linda Dijkshoorn is the founder and CEO of the biotechnological start-up EV Biotech. She has a very ambitious career path, setting up the company during her PhD at the University of Groningen. EV Biotech designs, engineers and optimizes micro-organisms to produce high-value chemicals like flavours and fragrances (such as vanillin) and biomaterials (such as spider-silk). The company uses state-of-the-art computational modelling techniques to optimize the genetic design of production strains, saving time, resources and waste.

Federico Muffatto is a biotechnologist, researcher, and entrepreneur with a passion for designing living things. He is the founder and CEO of Digi.Bio, a startup harnessing microfluidics and AI to make biology programmable. As a Waag Society Fellow, he has been exploring the intersection of art, science and technology through projects such as DNA data storage, human/algae hybrids, microfluidics, bacterial inks, living materials and 3D bioprinting. He is also currently working on setting up Biophil.es, a new DIY biospace in Amsterdam.

Nethaji Gallage is the CEO & co-founder of Octarine. Octarine’s mission is to harness synthetic biology to develop functionally superior cannabinoid and psilocybin derivatives targeting the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, Nethaji was a research group leader at the University of Copenhagen. She obtained her PhD in Biochemistry and has a track record of several high impact publications and patents within the field of synthetic biology.

Cyrille Pauthenier is a young researcher and entrepreneur in Synthetic Biology. He got his PhD in metabolic engineering methodology with a focus on retrieval of produced compounds at an industry viable scale and in 2014 co-founded the Abolis Biotechnologies company. Its goal is to bring state-of-the-art methodologies into metabolic engineering for the development of new micro-organisms capable of producing chemical molecules using fermentation of renewable resources.

Tom Ellis is a leading synthetic biologist based at Imperial College London, UK. His group’s research focuses on developing methods to accelerate synthetic genomics and parts-based synthetic biology in S. cerevisiae and other industrially- and medically-relevant microbes. This work involves automation and up-scaling, paving the way for the production of functional biomaterials.

Marc Güell is a tenure-track professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and is currently leading the Translational Synthetic Biology Laboratory. He and his team work on engineering biology with new therapeutic strategies in mind, specifically in areas such as new natural product evolution, microbiome engineering, and precise tools for gene therapy. Additionally, Marc Güell is also active as a biotechnological entrepreneur.

Dora Tang is a group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, as part of the MaxSynBio consortium. Her research lies between biophysics, synthetic biology and materials chemistry with the goal of building minimal synthetic cellular systems as physical models for biological phenomena. Her group focuses specifically on compartmentalisation and molecular organization through the study of coacervates, lipid vesicles and hybrid protocells.

Louise Horsfall is Chair of Sustainable Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is focused on applying synthetic biology to improve the sustainability of biological processes and products. Her team works on the sustainable production of enzymes, bio-based chemicals and biomaterials, on the biological upcycling of metals and on the enzymatic processing of biomass. Her research is especially relevant in the context of a sustainable circular bio-economy.