Event
ChBE Seminar Series: Ramon Gonzalez
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Room 2110 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Panagiotis Dimitrakopoulos
dimitrak@umd.edu
Realizing the Promise of Engineered Metabolism: from Bioenergy to Pharmaceutical Production
Ramon Gonzalez
Associate Professor
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and
Department of Bioengineering
Rice University
Homepage | Web Site
Biological systems are capable of performing many useful functions with potential applications in energy and chemical production, environmental remediation, pharmaceutical production, and agricultural systems. However, their full potential remains unrealized due to critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of how these systems function and in our ability to engineer and control them. Our research seeks to fill in these gaps by: i) developing an integrated system-level approach to elucidate the metabolic and regulatory networks that control the functioning of biological systems; and ii) designing novel engineering strategies to manipulate them and optimize their performance. In this talk I will highlight recent progress in these areas with special emphasis on the study of carbon metabolism in E. coli and Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells using systems biology approaches and the development of new metabolic engineering platforms for the production of fuels and chemicals.
