Gregory Stephanopoulos was born in Kalamata, Greece, in 1950. Since 2006, he is the holder of the W. H. Dow Professorship of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
After graduation from NTUA he continued his studies in the United States. In 1975 he obtained his M.S. from the University of Florida and, three years later, his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota. Professors Arnold Fredrickson and Rutherford Aris were his doctoral mentors. His professional career started in 1978 as Assistant Professor at Caltech where he was promoted in 1984 to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. In 1985, Gregory Stephanopoulos moved to MIT as Professor of Chemical Engineering. He was Bayer Professor between 2000 and 2006, when he was appointed to the W. H. Dow Professorship of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. From 1990 to 1997 he served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (BPEC) at MIT. Since 1997, he has served as Lecturer on Surgery and Bioengineering for Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital, while he spent the academic year 2006-2007 as Visiting Professor at the ETH Zurich.
The professional career of Professor Stephanopoulos is underscored by his prolific scientific production: he is the co-author of a book and the editor of five other titles, while he has written or co-authored more than 430 papers and is co-inventor of more than 50 patents. During his tenure, he has trained and supervised more than 150 Graduate and Post-Doctoral students; he presently serves on the Editorial Boards of 12 scientific journals (see CV for full list) and currently serves as Editor-in Chief of Metabolic Engineering (since 2003) and co-Editor–in-Chief of Current Opinion in Biotechnology (since 2010). Throughout his career he has served on the Advisory Boards of numerous Panels and Scientific Advisory Boards of government, academic and industrial organizations. Presently he serves on the Advisory Board of the Swiss NSF for National Centers for Competence in Research (NCCR), the Delft Process Technology Institute (DPTI), the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology, the Board of Directors of the International Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE), and the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB).
Professor Stephanopoulos currently works in Cambridge, at the Department of Chemical Engineering of MIT, focusing on biotechnology, specifically metabolic and biochemical engineering. He is the Director of the Metabolic Engineering Laboratory. His group of approximately 20 graduate students and post-docs conducts research on various projects aiming at the development of biological production routes to chemical products and biofuels. Another program is investigating cancer as metabolic disease.
Robert Kourist studied Biochemistry from 2000 to 2006 at the Universities of Greifswald (Germany) and Oviedo (Spain). During his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Uwe Bornscheuer in Greifswald (2006-2008) he developed enzymatic reactions for the synthesis of optically pure tertiary alcohols. In 2009, he went for a postdoctoral stay to the laboratory of Prof. Kenji Miyamoto at the Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. From 2012 to 2016 he was Juniorprofessor for Microbial Biotechnology at the Ruhr-University Bochum and was appointed as professor and head of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Graz University of Technology in January 2017. Robert Kourist received the DSM Science and Technology Award North (2009) and a 1st prize in the VentureCup Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (2009). In 2016, he became a member of the Young College of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.
Dr. Kourist’s research is dedicated to the combination of chemical and biological catalysts, with a special focus on the combination of enzymes with transition metal catalysts. A second line of research aims at the utilization of chemolitothrophic and autotrophic microorganisms for the production of useful chemicals.
Jean Marie FRANCOIS got his PhD from University of Louvain in 1988 (Belgium). He was appointed full professor of Industrial Microbiology and BioNanotechnology at the National Institute of Applied Sciences, University federal of Toulouse, in 1993 and reached the Exceptional class in 2009. He is member of the Microbial physiology and Biotechnology & Bioengineering, section of the European Federation of Biotechnology. He is editor in Chief in BMC Biotechnology for Biofuels since 2017, editor associated of Frontiers in Synthetic Biology, member of the editorial board of FEMS Yeast Research and of Microbial Cell. He has been appointed as expert member of European Science Foundation in 2016. He holds more than 180 publications in international refereed journals and 17 patents. In 2010, he co-founded Dendris SA (www.dendris.fr ) a startup that exploits recent development in BioNanotechnology for molecular in vitro diagnostic
Lucia Gardossi is an organic chemist who devoted her research work to the perfectly optimized enzymatic machineries. She believes that “enzymes are the most efficient chemical laboratories at low environmental impact” but their full exploitation requires molecular and physical-chemical understanding. Thus, her research integrates experimental work with computational approaches. In the last decade her activities evolved from the study of biocatalyst for sustainable process innovation to the exploitation of enzymes for the production of renewable sustainable products. As a consequence, she is currently involved in EU working groups for the development of Bioeconomy and Bio-Based chemistry, where she combines the interest in sustainable chemistry with her passion for a science “in and for society”. Lucia has worked both in Italian and US Universities and funded a company in the field of industrial biotechnology.
Magali Remaud Simeon is Professor at the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Toulouse and is head of the Catalysis and Enzyme Molecular Engineering group of the “Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des Système Biologiques and Procédé (LISBP). She received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Toulouse and was Post-Doc at the University of Pennsylvania. She has co-authored more than 150 papers and is co-inventor of 22 patents. Her research activities focus on Enzyme Engineering for white biotechnology, green chemistry, health, food/feed industries and synthetic biology. They cover enzyme structure/activity relationship studies, kinetic resolution, evolution combining both rational and combinatorial approaches, and applications to the synthesis of glycans, glycoconjugates and various synthons of interest. Her work is currently focused on the search and generation of enzymes displaying new specifi cities and improved catalytic properties. Her objective is to open new trajectories for biomass transformation. To this end, she specifi cally targets the integration of tailored enzymes in chemo-enzymatic cascades, new metabolic pathways or enzyme-based processes.
Peter Neubauer is Professor of Bioprocess Engineering at the Department of Biotechnology at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, since 2008. He holds a doctoral degree in Microbiology from Universität Greifswald, Germany, and completed postdocs at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, and Martin-Luther-Universität of Halle, Germany, before he received a professorship in bioprocess engineering from the University of Oulu, Finland (2000–2008). His research is concerned with bioprocess scale up/scale down and microbial physiology in industrial scale bioprocesses, as well as the development of strategies for the production of difficult-to-express proteins and the mathematical modelling of bioprocesses.
Selin Kara completed B.Sc. Chemical Engineering and B.Sc. Food Engineering studies at Middle East Technical University (Turkey). In 2005, she moved to Germany for M.Sc. study in Biotechnology at Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and in 2011 she was awarded a Ph.D. degree in bioprocess engineering at the TUHH, Institute of Technical Biocatalysis. From October 2011 to September 2013, she worked as a PostDoc researcher within the Biocatalysis Group at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands). In September 2013, she started her Habilitation (venia legendi) in the Chair of Molecular Biotechnology at TU Dresden (Germany). In May 2018, Selin Kara completed her Habilitation (venia legendi) in the research fields of Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering at TUHH. Since 2018, Selin Kara is leading the research group Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing within the Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering at Aarhus University (Denmark) and since October 2021 she is Head of the institute of Technical Chemistry at Leibniz University Hannover (Germany).