I am currently pursuing a Molecular Biology PhD at Princeton University, deeply motivated by my experiences growing up in Kingston, Jamaica. Growing up in a developing nation exposed me to the numerous detrimental impacts of unsustainable economic and industrial practices, compelling me to explore biotechnology as a catalyst for sustainable development. Driven by this passion, my current research focuses on the exploration and engineering of non-conventional yeasts for sustainable bioprocessing. Through targeted bioengineering of non-conventional yeasts, my goal is to enhance current bioprocessing practices by optimizing their variety of industrially beneficial characteristics, thereby providing engineered yeasts as platforms for gradually replacing unsustainable industrial processes.

José Avalos is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. He is also an associated faculty member in the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Department of Molecular Biology. His research focuses on the use of biotechnology to address challenges in renewable energy, sustainable manufacturing, the environment, and human health. His lab works primarily in metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, protein engineering, systems biology, and structural biology.

I am a biological engineer passionate about the field of metabolic engineering. I grew up in Mexico, where I learned about the importance of preserving our natural resources. I am currently a graduate student at Princeton University, where I am working on a variety of projects that aim to improve the production of advanced biofuels in yeast cell factories. I strongly believe that biotechnology will move our transition towards a green economy.

Jef Boeke is the Founding Director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is known for work on mechanistic and genomic aspects of retrotransposition, and develops technologies in genetics, genomics and synthetic biology. Born in 1954 in Albany NY, he grew up in New Jersey and received a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry from Bowdoin College in 1972. Following this he spent a year as a Watson Fellow, collecting plants in the Andes. He obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Rockefeller University in 1982, where he worked on the genetics of filamentous phage assembly with Peter Model and Norton Zinder. He did his postdoctoral work at MIT/Whitehead Institute on yeast/transposon genetics with Gerald Fink. He served on the faculty of the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1986-2014, where he also founded the High Throughput Biology Center.

I am a passionate synthetic biologist working on constructing a designed eukaryotic genome in yeast, commonly known as synthetic yeast (Sc2.0). With its fully synthesized genome, this groundbreaking platform will allow us to answer previously unapproachable questions, particularly in chemical manufacturing and biofuels, an increasingly important global challenge.My current research also drives me to develop "genome writing" in mammalian systems. My goal is to advance human genetic disease and cancer research by pushing the boundaries of mammalian genome engineering with an unprecedented capacity.