Plantae Presents: Special Event: Claudia Vickers and Guillaume Barbier

Plantae Presents Special Event: Claudia Vickers and Guillaume Barbier

Special Event: Plant Synthetic Biology

Recorded March 31 – 4pm EDT, 9pm BST, Thursday April 1, 7am in Sydney

Save the date for the 2021 Plant Synthetic Biology conference (virtual) September 25 – 27. More details to follow.

Claudia Vickers. Making plant natural products economically viable: Synthetic biology tools for metabolic engineering of isoprenoids in microbes

Claudia Vickers is Director of the Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform at  CSIRO (Australia’s national research agency). Her early research interests spanned crop plant engineering, abiotic stress and volatile isoprenoids. More recently she has focussed on metabolic regulation of isoprenoids in plants and microbes, and on developing synthetic biology tools for rational re-engineering of metabolism. She was founding President of Synthetic Biology Australia and is on the Executive of the International Society for Terpenoids (TERPNET). She is a Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) Fellow and she co-chairs the World Economic Forum Synthetic Biology Future Council. She serves on editorial boards for eight international journals and has Adjunct Professor roles at Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University.

Guillaume Barbier: Engineering of biological nitrogen fixation for sustainable agriculture

Guillaume Barbier received his PhD at Michigan Technological University and carried out postdoctoral research with Andreas Weber and Ian Small. He has expertise in protein expression systems and metabolic engineering and worked at several companies including Novozymes (2011-2018). Since 2018 he has been the Biofertility program director; Nitrogen fixation, at Joyn Bio, Boston, MA.

Moderated by Jaya Joshi

Jaya Joshi is a synthetic biologist, interested in metabolic engineering and directed evolution of enzymes. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Andrew Hanson’s lab at the University of Florida, she studied the directed evolution of microbial non-suicidal THI4s- thiazole synthases, as an alternative to the notorious suicidal plant THI4s. Recently, she moved to Dr. Vincent Martin’s lab at the Centre for Structural and Functional Genomics, Montreal, to explore the unimaginative power of biofoundries in the field of synthetic biology. In this new setting, she is trying to engineer a special kind of yeast for lactose valorization. Beyond science, she has a long-held interest in educating the general public about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and science outreach activities. She is an ardent advocate of the role of women in science and loves talking about how women will make big contributions in the field of synthetic biology.

This webinar is freely available thanks to the support of the American Society of Plant Biologists. Join today.