Careers in engineering biology

Holly is CEO at HydRegen, a 2021 spinout company from University of Oxford, delivering more sustainable chemical manufacturing by bringing together the best of industrial biotechnology and modern chemistry. She has a MChem and DPhil in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, where she worked on the HydRegen bio-technologies from their inception. Between 2016 and 2021 Holly led a £3m translation grant to take the technologies towards commercialisation as a Postdoc / Research Project Manager. She was awarded the Felix Franks Biotechnology Medal 2022 by the Royal Society of Chemistry, recognising her contribution to the field of chemical biology. Holly regularly talks at events to inspire the next generation of science entrepreneurs and advocates for the many different people and skills required for impactful translational research. 

Cai Linton has an MEng in Molecular Bioengineering from Imperial College London and combines technical knowledge in tissue engineering and data science with management experience. His motivation to create a sustainable future using biotechnology led him to co-found Multus to shorten routes to market and lower entry barriers in the cultivated meat industry. Multus makes it faster and cheaper to get growth media that scales, accelerating the adoption of cellular agriculture. The company’s growth media formulations and ingredients are the building blocks of cellular agriculture and enable the affordable at-scale production of real animal products, including meat, dairy, leather, and more, using cells instead of animals. 

Chiara Gandini is an industrial biotechnologist and synthetic biologist with a background spanning both industry and academia. Her experience includes optimizing protein expression in E. coli for both small and large-scale production (CPC Biotech and Universitá di Milano), dissecting photosynthetic mechanisms in cyanobacteria and plants (LMU), engineering diatoms to produce high-value compounds for fish feedstocks and exploring the feasibility of indoor farming for commodity crops (Rothamsted Research). At the Open Bioeconomy Lab, she worked on developing molecular biology tools for low-cost enzyme production in resource-limited settings (University of Cambridge). Currently, Chiara works at Nuclera, a scale-up that developed the eProtein Discovery system that significantly reduces time and resources required to obtain challenging proteins of interest. She initially jointed the R&D team to help develop the system and now plays a key role in its commercialization.

Jack Weaver is a policy officer for Engineering Biology & Industrial Biotechnology at DSIT, having joined the civil service after his PhD and one day before the departments creation. In this role he works on policy to promote growth for the sector. His PhD was in Synthetic Biology at the University of Warwick, where he developed low-cost platforms for identifying fungal biosynthetic gene clusters from scratch, inserting them into new host organisms, and optimising their expression to develop industrially viable strains for creation of novel chemical products. Before this he spent 5 years in Aberdeen undertaking his BSc and MSc in Biotechnology and running the University of Aberdeen’s adventure sports society.

I am a Technical Specialist at ARIA where I am responsible for evaluating proposals and providing recommendations to fund projects as part of our Opportunity space on Programmable Plants. I also work in an advisory capacity with the teams we fund to ensure timely technical delivery and good sharing of knowledge within the communities we help create.

I have experience working in software/hardware biotech startups in the agricultural and medical sectors - first at Synthace, a software company working on empowering scientist to optimise experimental design and easily use automation; and more recently at Gardin, a hardware/software company developing a low cost insight platform to optimise production in controlled environment agriculture, where I headed the Plant Science R&D department and was part of the founding leadership team.

I hold a PhD in Plant Science from Cambridge, and joint degrees in biotechnology from the University of Pisa and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, and my specialties include plant science, molecular biology, genetics and synbio.

Fiona began her career as a science communicator covering CRISPR, climate, and biotech for space travel. She now serves as SynBioBeta’s Director of International Outreach and media covering climate, heavy industry, international investment and policy. She is also a member of the OECD’s GFTech Expert Focus Group for synthetic biology.