ChE Seminar Series Presents: “Engineering Bacteria to Solve Problems in Renewable Chemical Production and Human Health”

ChE Seminar Series Presents:

Benjamin M. Woolston, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston , MA

“Engineering Bacteria to Solve Problems in Renewable Chemical Production and Human Health”

Abstract: The synthetic biology revolution has given us the ability to genetically reprogram microbes to serve a wide variety of purposes – from miniscule chemical factories that orchestrate exquisitely selective enzymatic pathways to produce fuels, pharmaceuticals and polymers from simple raw materials – to biological computers that can sense their chemical environment and implement complex decision-making algorithms. The overall goal of the Woolston lab is to harness this potential for applications in renewable energy production and the human gut microbiota. In this talk, I will present an overview of the two major current thrusts of the lab: In the first, we are engineering anaerobic bacteria for the conversion of renewable single-carbon feedstocks to biofuels, taking advantage of a number of economic and ethical benefits of using these substrates compared to 1^st and 2^nd generation biofuel efforts. In the second, we are developing engineered microbes that can sense and correct an overabundance of the microbially derived metabolite hydrogen sulfide in the human gut; a toxic, volatile molecule implicated in the onset of IBD and colorectal cancer. As well as the exciting applied potential of the resultant technology, these efforts will also provide us with model systems with which to answer broader fundamental questions about microbial metabolism.

Biography: Dr. Woolston joined the NEU Chemical Engineering department as an Assistant Professor in January 2020. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Dr. Woolston received his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2017 from MIT under the guidance of Prof. Greg Stephanopoulos, where his research focused on the development of genetic tools to enable metabolic engineering in anaerobic CO₂-fixing microbes, and the establishment of a methanol utilization pathway in the model organism Escherichia coli. While at MIT, he was an inaugural Fellow of the Chemical Engineering Communication Lab, where he provided peer tutoring and department-wide workshops to assist students and post-docs with aspects of scientific communication. His Post-doctoral work was conducted in the laboratory of Prof. Emily Balskus in the Chemistry & Chemical Biology department at Harvard University, where he studied microbial metabolic pathways and enzymes that contribute to the stability of health-associated Lactobacilli in the human vaginal microbiota. At Northeastern, his research program combines approaches from his previous research training in metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, biochemistry and microbiology to engineer microbes for biofuel & biochemical production, and as diagnostics and therapeutics in the Human gut microbiota. His lab team currently consists of three graduate students and two undergraduates. Since joining NEU, Dr. Woolston has taught the Biochemical Engineering senior elective (CHME 5630) and the graduate course in Kinetics & Reactor Design (CHME 7340).

Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.