Current Research Interests
Molecular engineering for repurposing natural materials and bio-process development.
Our group is interested in developing biological solutions to tackle problems in medicine and environment. The current efforts are focused on reducing PET waste. With a production rate of 1M PET bottles/minute and 450 years to degrade, PET waste is one of the most important environmental problems of our time. We are engineering both enzymes to degrade the PET waste and microbes to convert the enzymatic degradation products to value-added molecules. Process scale-up will also be explored.