Speakers
Cynthia Collins
Senior Director, Head of Small Molecule and Genome Recoding Business
Ginkgo Bioworks
Cynthia Collins is an accomplished professional with extensive experience in the fields of biochemistry and organism engineering. Currently serving as the Head of Strategy for the Discovery and Manufacturing Solutions Business Unit at Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc., Cynthia has held various senior roles, including Chief of Staff for Codebase and Senior Director of Organism Engineering.
With a solid academic foundation, Cynthia was an Associate Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for over a decade and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. In addition to academic pursuits, Cynthia has also contributed to the American Chemical Society's Biochemical Technology Division, serving as Division Chair and Program Chair for the annual meeting. Educational qualifications include a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Caltech and a BSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Toronto.
David Kaplan
Distinguished Professor
Tufts University School of Engineering
https://engineering.tufts.edu/bme/people/faculty/david-kaplan
David Kaplan is the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering at Tufts University, a Distinguished University Professor, a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA). His research focus is on biopolymer engineering, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture. He has published over 1,000 peer reviewed papers, he is editor-in-chief of ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering and he serves on many editorial boards and programs for journals and universities. He has received awards for his research and teaching and is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the National Academy of Engineering.
Matt DeLisa
Director of the Institute of Biotechnology, R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Cornell University
Matthew DeLisa received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2003. He was promoted to associate professor in 2009 and to professor in 2013, at which time he was named the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering. He also recently served as a Gastprofessur at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the Institut für Mikrobiologie.
Professor DeLisa’s research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis — folding and assembly, membrane translocation and post-translational modifications — in the complex environment of a living cell. His contributions to science and engineering include the invention of numerous commercially important technologies for facilitating the discovery, design and manufacturing of human drugs and seminal discoveries in the areas of cellular protein folding and protein translocation.
DeLisa has received several awards for his work including an NSF CAREER award (2005), a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator award (2004), a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator award (2005), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2006), and a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award (2007), the inaugural Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang award (2008), a Cornell Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship (2009), the American Chemical Society BIOT division Young Investigator award (2010), and the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award (2013). He was also named one of the top 35 young innovators (TR35) by MIT’s Technology Review (2005), was selected as the Allan P. Colburn Memorial Lecturer at the University of Delaware (2009), and was chosen to deliver the Keynote Lecture at the SIMB RAFT X Meeting (2013). Most recently, he was named the AIChE Division 15C Plenary Award Lecturer (2013), was selected to the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group (2014-15), and was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2014).