Awards

Congratulations to the winners of 2010 Society Awards:

Charles Porter Award: Doug Jaeger, Doug Jaeger and Assoc.
Charles Thom Award: Michael Adams, University of Georgia, Athens
SIM Fellow: Sang Yup Lee, KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Waksman Outstanding Teaching Award: George Bennett, Rice University
Young Investigator Award: Yi Tang, University of California, Los Angeles
Best Student Oral Presentation Award: Taylor Oberg, Utah State University, Logan, UT
Best Student Poster Presentation Awards:
  • Biocatalysis Section: Ponlada Permpornsakul, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
  • Environmental Section: Rafiqul Islam, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON Canada
  • Fermentation/Cell Culture: Sang-Min Park, Kangwon National University, Kangwon, Korea
  • Natural Products: Lauren Pickens, UCLA
  • Metabolic Engineering: Rebecca Lennen, University of Wisconsin, Madison


Featured Speakers

Amgen Keynote Address

Dr. Drew Endy
Stanford University
"A New Biotechnology for the 21st Century"

Drew Endy grew up in Pennsylvania, earning degrees in civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh University. Following a summer internship at Amtrak, he earned a PhD in biochemical engineering at Dartmouth College. He then studied microbiology and genetics as a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked with Roger Brent and Sydney Brenner at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. Drew joined the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) as a Fellow in Biology and Biological Engineering (BE) in 2002, later joining the faculty in the newly created Department of Biological Engineering. At MIT, Drew developed and taught five courses in helping to launch MIT's new undergraduate major in BE. His lab published a systematic redesign ("refactoring") of a natural organism's genome, successfully implementing over 600 simultaneous genetic changes while maintaining: organism viability, a comprehensive "datasheet" for an abstracted genetic device, methods and a reference standard for measuring gene expression inside living cells, and a contrarian observation that incredibly tiny and "molecularly noisy" bacteria appear to implement reliable behavior. Drew has helped found a few companies, the iGEM competition, the synthetic biology (SB x.0) conference series, and the BioBricks Foundation, a non-profit that is working to create open technology platforms supporting the next generation of biotech. His group at Stanford Bioengineering is working to implement scaleable genetic memory systems, for storing and controlling modest amounts of information inside living systems. Esquire named Endy one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century.



SIM Industry Award lecture

John Joly
Genentech
"Process Development Innovation for Advancing Human Therapeutic Production"

John Joly is currently the Director of Early Stage Cell Culture (ESCC) in the Pharma Technical Development organization at Genentech, Inc. He has led the ESCC group for the past five years. This group works closely with Research turning molecular candidates into cell lines and early phase development production processes to produce materials for use in R&D, toxicology, and early stage clinical trial applications. John has worked at Genentech, Inc. for the past seventeen years. Prior to leading the ESCC group he led the technical development team for the LucentisŪ project and worked on the fermentation process from Phase I through the Qualification lots. Over the years his group has worked extensively on improving cell line and process development for both microbial and mammalian cell culture applications. Prior to joining Genentech, Inc., John was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Bill Wickner at UCLA studying protein translocation across the cytoplasmic membrane in E. coli. John received his Ph.D. in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department at the University of Florida working with Dr. Daniel Purich and received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of Virginia. He has been a member of SIM since 1997.

Alma Dietz Guest Speaker

Michael Fischbach
University of California, San Francisco
"A gene-to-molecule approach to discovering and characterizing natural products from the human microbiome"

Michael Fischbach is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF. His research focuses on using a combination of genomics and chemistry to identify and characterize small molecules from microbes, with an emphasis on the human microbiome. Fischbach received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard in 2007, where he worked jointly in the laboratories of Christopher Walsh and David Liu on the role of iron acquisition in bacterial pathogenesis and on the biosynthesis of antibiotics. Before coming to UCSF, Fischbach spent two years as an independent fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital coordinating a collaborative effort based at the Broad Institute to develop genomics-based approaches to the discovery of small molecules from microbes.



Banquet Speaker

Raul Cano
Environmental Biotechnology Institute, California Polytechnic State University
"Ancient Yeasts and Premium Beers; The Story of Fossil Fuels Brewing Company"

Dr. Raul Cano is Professor Emeritus at the Biological Sciences Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Dr. Cano is the founder and current Director the Environmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI). As founding Scientist and Vice President of Ambergene Corporation, he isolated and characterized more than 2,000 ancient microorganisms from amber and other fossils in a drug-discovery effort from natural products. His management skills include Director of the EBI (1996-present), Founding Scientist and Vice-President of Ambergene Corporation (1993-1997) and President and Founder of Environmental Diagnostics as well as Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.

Dr. Cano is best known for his groundbreaking work with ancient DNA and microorganisms. Dr. Cano specializes in molecular and environmental microbiology. His laboratory sequenced the genomes of Lactobacillus acidophilus and the bacteriophage B3 of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. He has done patented work on deriving ancient bacteria from amber inclusions, and has patents pending for methods of detecting pathogens in foods and for genes of L. acidophilus responsible for the probiotic properties of the bacterium. His Ph.D. in microbiology was granted by the University of Montana in 1974. Dr. Cano also holds degrees in Genetics and Clinical Microbiology. He has taught at Cal Poly for more than 30 years, where he has received more than a dozen awards, including the prestigious Carski Award from the American Society for Microbiology. Dr Cano has also written several textbooks, has served as scientific consultant to several biotechnology and legal firms, and is an elected fellow to the American Academy of Microbiology.

Charles Thom Award Lecture

Michael Adams
University of Georgia, Athens
"Biofuels: 2050 and Beyond"

Michael Adams received his BS and PhD degrees from the University of London. After post-doctoral research at Purdue University, he spent eight years at Exxon Research and Engineering in Annandale, NJ, and joined the University of Georgia in 1987. He became a Distinguished Research Professor in 1996 and the Georgia Power Professor of Biotechnology in 2007. His research concerns hyperthermophiles, which are microorganisms that grow near and above 100°C. The focus has been the discovery and characterization of novel metal-containing enzymes involved in the primary metabolic pathways of carbohydrate and peptide utilization, hydrogen production and the oxidative stress response. Much of his research utilizes the anaerobic archaeon Pyrococcus furiosus, which grows optimally at the boiling point. The organism has been the subject of projects involving transcriptomics, proteomics and structural genomics, and enzymes have been characterized by a variety of biochemical, molecular, structural and spectroscopic techniques. Current studies involve recombinant production of hydrogen-activating enzymes and developing methods to define microbial metalloproteomes. Other hyperthermophiles of interest in his laboratory include the anaerobic bacterium Caldicellulosiruptor bescii. This organism grows up to 90°C and has the remarkable ability to utilize plant biomass without chemical pretreatment. Dr. Adams is a member of the DOE BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has over 250 publications and has co/edited eight books in the areas of hyperthermophiles, hydrogen metabolism and metal-containing enzymes. He is an Editor of the Journal of Bacteriology and is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.