ONR Young Investigator Award for Engineering Clostridia Microbes
ChE Assistant Professor Benjamin Woolston received a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research for “Expanding the Product Range of Anaerobic Methanol Fermentation.” He is engineering Clostridia microbes that absorb methanol and convert them into protein-based biomass deriving a wide range of materials, from food to plastics.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Noah LIo. Main photo: Benjamin Woolston, assistant professor of chemical engineering, “hacks” the genome of the bacteria Clostridia. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
This Northeastern researcher is hacking genomes to grow plastic and feed astronauts
Benjamin Woolston, CHE assistant professor, headshot.
Benjamin Woolston hacks microbes.
An assistant professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University, Woolston engineers microorganisms so that, “instead of the cell doing what it wants to do, we get it to do something that we want it to do,” he says.
Right now, that means making “precursor molecules,” Woolston says.
Precursor to what? Everything from “complex, food-type molecules” to “things that could be used to make rubber, or make plastic.”
A microbial cell, he says, takes “in nutrients from its surroundings, from its media. It has enzymes encoded within its genomes, basically converting those compounds to generate energy for itself to survive. It’s generating more of itself.
“We try to manipulate all those reactions.”
Woolston recently received the 2025 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his project, called “Expanding the Product Range of Anaerobic Methanol Fermentation.”
“But why is the Navy interested in this?” he asks—rhetorically—with a laugh.
Ethanol is going out of fashion
Samples used in the Woolston Lab. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
The short answer is that ethanol, a primary component in the fuel of many vehicles, from cars to naval vessels, is far from sustainable—40% of arable land in the United States is currently earmarked for bioethanol fuel production, Woolston says.
But as the global population continues to grow, Woolston continues, we will “need to double current agricultural production” by 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
So “why are we using the best land we have,” Woolston asks, “the best growing areas and best growing conditions, to produce something that’s going to end up making a fuel that’s burned in an automobile engine?”
But methanol—a chemical cousin to ethanol—can be made by other means, including through electric catalysis, “where you use electricity, react it with CO2, and one of the things you can make from that is methanol,” Woolston says.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News