Eric Steen

As the CEO of Lygos, Dr. Steen’s primary responsibilities include establishing a strategic vision, managing partnership and customer development, process commercialization, product development, and fundraising. Under his leadership, Lygos has secured a strategic investment from LG Technology Ventures and been awarded several research grants from the United States Department of Energy (DOE), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The company’s innovative work has been consistently recognized by leading industry influencers, such as BioFuels Digest, SynBioBeta, and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. Dr. Steen is an expert in optimizing sugar to produce conversion efficiency and has been covered by The New York Times, Nature, TechCrunch, and Biomass Magazine. Prior to co-founding Lygos, he led efforts to engineer yeast for the conversion of sugars into fuels and chemicals at the Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute; these technologies resulted in numerous peer-reviewed publications and patents, which are in various stages of commercialization. Dr. Steen earned a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in Providence, RI, and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. While in graduate school, Dr. Steen completed a program in Management of Technology at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.