Christopher Voigt

Dr. Christopher Voigt is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, Co-Director of the Synthetic Biology Center, and Co-Founder of the MIT-Broad Foundry. His lab focuses on pushing genetic engineering to the scale and complexity of designing genomes from the bottom up. They have developed genetically-encoded sensors and circuits and have used these to control multiple pathways and cellular functions. This has been applied to the optimization of chemical and materials production and to the discovery of novel pharmaceuticals. He holds joint appointments at the Broad Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), and the University of California – San Francisco (UCSF). He received his BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan (1998) and Ph.D. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from Caltech (2002). He serves on the science advisory boards of DSM, Bolt Threads, Pivot Bio, SynLogic, Amyris Biotechnologies, Cambrian Genomics, and Zymergen. He has been honored with a National Security Science & Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF), Sloan Fellow, Pew Fellow, Packard Fellow, NSF Career Award, Vaughan Lecturer, and MIT TR35. He has prepared reports and briefings on synthetic biology for the National Academies of Science, National Science Foundation, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Congress. He founded the journal ACS Synthetic Biology and serves as the Editor-in-Chief and co-founded the SEED conference series.