Team:Wisconsin-Madison/advisors

Brian Pfleger

Brian F. Pfleger: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, 2007-present with appointment in Biomedical Engineering. He received his PhD after studying in the laboratory of Jay D. Keasling at Cal-Berkeley where he developed metabolic engineering methods to enhance the biosynthesis of pharmaceuticals. This experience trained him to design, construct and evaluate strains of Escherichia coli for the production of small molecules by integrating synthetic and systems biology. After graduating, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship (NIH-GLRCE) in the laboratory of David H. Sherman at the University of Michigan, where he studied six Bacillus anthracis enzymes and how they assembled a complex natural product essential for iron acquisition and pathogenesis. Research in the Sherman lab exposed him to the combinatorial nature of natural product biosynthesis and taught him how to work with these novel enzymes. His current interest is engineering sustainable chemical production using synthetic biology.

Wes Marner

Wesley D. Marner II is an Assistant Scientist and co-director of the Microbial Synthetic Biology Lab within the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Marner earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and later received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis work, under the direction of Jay Keasling and Susan Muller, focused on biological production of artificial protein- and silica-based biomaterials. At the GLBRC, Marner’s group focuses on improving the efficiency and productivity of biofuel processes at both the cellular and the bioreactor scale. Using the tools of synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and advanced fermentation, his group and collaborators are engineering microbes for the efficient breakdown of biomass and subsequent conversion into fuel.