University Relations

2011 Agilent Early Career Professor Award Winner

2011 Focus: Alignment with the field of integrated biology, including the individual omics. Work in this area will typically involve two or more of the omics (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) and will seek to build understanding by relating the different views of biological systems while contributing to the understanding of life.

Dr. Michael Jewett Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering Jewett Lab

Dr. Jewett joined the faculty of Engineering at Northwestern in 2009 where he engineers biological systems for compelling applications in medicine and biotechnology. He made strong contributions to cell-free biology during his Ph.D. work at Stanford, to systems biology at the Technical University of Denmark, and to synthetic biology at Harvard as a post-doctoral researcher before coming to Northwestern.

In James Swartz's lab at Stanford University, Jewett developed a high yielding and cost-effective bacterial cell-free protein synthesis platform that is now being used as a high-throughput protein production platform and for the commercial production of personalized medicines. Although cell-free translation systems had been used for more than 50 years, Jewett demonstrated that central metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, transcription, and translation could be co-activated in a single test tube under conditions conducive to high-level protein synthesis.

In Jens Nielsen’s lab at the Technical University of Denmark, Jewett generated the first datasets in yeast that integrated data across at least three levels of the cellular hierarchy and protein interaction information with metabolic network topology. Jewett and colleagues discovered that genome-scale metabolic models could be used to upgrade the information content obtained in systems-level data for bridging the gap between transcriptional state and metabolic flux.

In George Church’s lab at the Harvard Medical School, Jewett constructed ribosomes in vitro as a milestone towards a novel ribosome evolution platform and the construction of synthetic life. In a demonstration elusive for four decades, he showed that Escherichia coli ribosomes could be reconstituted in a one-step incubation procedure under chemical conditions that mimic the cytoplasm. Jewett also discovered that ribosomal RNA synthesis could be combined with ribosome self-assembly to make functionally active ribosomes. This advance promises to accelerate the development of synthetic ribosomes capable of producing and evolving non-natural peptide drugs and hybrid materials.

Jewett received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1999 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his M.S. in 2001 and his Ph.D. in 2005 Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.

2010 Agilent Early Career Professor Award Winner

2010 focus: Alignment with the field of Systems Biology. Work in this area will typically involve two or more of the omics (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) and will seek to build understanding by relating the different views of biological systems while contributing to the understanding of life.

Michelle Chang Assistant Professor of Chemistry University of California, Berkeley

Professor Michelle Chang works at the interface of chemistry, molecular and cell biology, and bioengineering. She brings a deep knowledge of chemistry, enzymology, reaction mechanisms, and microbial synthesis pathways to the challenge of engineering microbes to produce useful chemicals.

In her thesis work at MIT, Professor Chang fearlessly applied a novel measurement approach to elucidate the action mechanism of ribonucleotide reductase and brought new understanding to the study of so-called proton coupled electron tunneling reactions. Her advisor, Joanne Stubbe, described this highly cited work as a “tour de force”. In her postdoctoral work with Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley, she worked on the production of an antimalarial drug using metabolic engineering and was successful in a short period of time. Independently, ProfessorChang has focused on combining metabolic engineering, chemistry, and biochemistry to make novel therapeutic molecules, and biofuels.

This work starts by researching the tree of life for enzymes and reaction mechanisms that can be harnessed, then designing a synthesis pathway that is subsequently genetically engineered into a suitable microorganism like E. coli or yeast. She uses a combination of genomic and proteomic approaches to identify new enzymes that can be put to work to build biomolecules. For medical therapeutics, she focuses on introducing fluorine into natural and synthetic small molecules. For biofuels, she is working on engineered organisms to breakdown lignin in plant biomass to make the biomolecules more accessible for conversion to biofuels. At the same time, she has developed a six-step pathway in E. coli for production of butanol, a much more attractive fuel candidate than ethanol.

Professor Michelle Chang is a rising star, helping to pioneer the field of synthetic biology. Her work has already borne fruit in the form of an anti-malarial drug that Sanofi-Aventis is pursuing. We can expect other great things from her in the future.

Professor Chang joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley from the lab of Chemical Engineering professor Jay Keasling, where she was a postdoc from 2004-07. She co-authored several of the group’s papers on using engineered bacteria to produce a class of compounds that includes the anti-malaria drug artemisinin and anticancer drug taxol.

Professor Chang received a B.S. in biochemistry and a B.A. in French literature in 1997 at UC San Diego. In 2004, she earned her Ph.D. at MIT with Daniel Nocera and JoAnne Stubbe with whom she studied ribonucleotide reductase, an enzyme essential for DNA synthesis.

2009 Agilent Early Career Professor Award Winner

Boris Murmann Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Stanford University

Professor Boris Murmann is leading the charge into rethinking how we view analog circuit design. In 2003, Dr. Murmann set forth in his PhD dissertation and in a widely read IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits paper his pioneering work on optimization of system performance given advanced digital signal processing techniques, statistical variation, and limitations in the performance of sub-100nm CMOS analog devices. His work has led to a number of unique A/D converter architectures which dramatically reduce the power needed for A/D converters, and he has influenced the thinking of many about the science of analog circuit design.

After earning his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where he continues to work on radical approaches to the problems of data conversion and analog circuits in general. It is rare for a person to make such an important and transformative contribution to a well-established field.  Dr. Murmann is one of the Principal Investigators of the Rethinking Analog Design initiative at Stanford. Beyond his core research, Professor Murmann is engaged in a number of interdisciplinary programs in areas such as biosensing, microresonators and organic electronics. He has been cited at Berkeley and at Stanford for excellence in teaching. Dr. Murmann has quickly become one of the leading thinkers and speakers on how to move analog design forward in an increasingly digital-centric world. His four most-read- and best-paper awards attest to his eloquence and influence in the industry at large.