Kristen Van Gelder: Plant Physiology First Author

Kristen Van Gelder, co first author of “Respiratory energy demands and scope for demand expansion and destruction”

Current Position: Post-Doctoral Researcher

Education: PhD from the University of Guelph, Canada

Non-scientific interests: camping, hiking, and kayaking

Brief bio: My scientific interests are in plant specialized metabolism, which began by studying floral volatiles and eventually to studying isoprenoids in the Solanaceae family and phenolics in cannabis.  At the end of my PhD studies, I worked on engineering a cannabis phenolic pathway into yeast and soon came to realize how difficult and frustrating it can be to produce plant metabolites in microbes. In search of better tools and an engineering mindset, I was led to synthetic biology. As a postdoc, I now work on designing microbial enzymes to work in plant-like conditions, through continuous directed evolution.