Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University. Widely recognized in the world as a leading researcher in renewable energy, he is the inventor of the artificial leaf and bionic leaf. Nocera has accomplished the solar fuels process of photosynthesis – the splitting of water to hydrogen and oxygen using light from neutral water, at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. He has performed this solar process at efficiencies of greater than 10%. The artificial leaf was named by Time magazine as Innovation of the Year for 2011. He has since elaborated this invention to accomplish a complete artificial photosynthetic cycle.

https://www.nocera.harvard.edu/daniel-nocera

Nili is the CSO of Cultivarium.

Previously, she was a core member and the Director of Molecular Diagnostics at Pandemic Response Lab, a high-throughput diagnostic and genome biosurveillance COVID-19 facility established for New York City. Trained in Microbiology (MS), Chemistry (PhD) and Genetics (Postdoctoral Fellow), Nili has led several technology development projects in the field of synthetic biology. As a fellow at Harvard, she spearheaded construction of synthetic chromosomes, and established genome-scale engineering methods for non-model microbes. As a graduate student, she received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use baker’s yeast as an environmental sensor. Her research interests span protein engineering, nanomaterials, metabolic engineering and environmental microbiology.

https://www.convergentresearch.org/nili-ostrov

Reshma Shetty co-founded Ginkgo Bioworks in 2008. As President, Chief Operations Officer, and member of our board of directors, she has seen the company grow to over 500 people. Reshma has been active in the field of synthetic biology for 15+ years, and in 2006, she was an advisor to the iGEM competition where she was best known for engineering bacteria to smell like bananas and mint. Forbes magazine named Reshma one of 2008’s Eight People Inventing the Future, and Fast Company named her one of 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2011. Dr. Shetty has a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT.

https://investors.ginkgobioworks.com/governance/board-of-directors/person-details

Feng Zhang is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, as well as an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and a professor at MIT, with joint appointments in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering. Zhang is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/feng-zhang