Meet the Team

Andrew Penniman is the business manager for the BETC, PracticePoint, and CERES, and his roles include operations management, scheduling, billing, and allocation of internal resources needed to provide successful results to the end users, both internal and external.

Kenneth Dwyer is the lab manager for CERES, and his roles include marketing the lab to internal and external researchers, scheduling, billing, maintaining equipment, and training users on equipment.

My research is in the broad, interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology. Within this field, we apply chemical engineering tenets to reprogram the DNA of yeasts, bacteria, and fungi so their metabolism produces interesting molecules. By treating these cells as "chemical factories," we can approach and solve problems in biofuels, biomaterials, and biosensors from a chemical engineer's point of view. Our strengths are in the disciplines of metabolic engineering, protein engineering, and systems biology, which we use to construct novel synthetic ...