Tom Ellis

Tom Ellis FRSC is a Professor in the Bioengineering Department of Imperial College London with >60 publications in synthetic biology including work in Cell, PNAS, Nature Methods and Nature Biotech. Tom joined Imperial as a group leader in 2010 to help push research at the UK’s first centre for synthetic biology. He obtained his undergrad degree in Molecular Biology at Oxford University and his PhD from the University of Cambridge examined the use of DNA-binding drugs as synthetic gene expression regulators. Tom followed-up his PhD research working at a London-based drug-discovery start-up, before moving to Boston, USA to spend two years investigating synthetic biology at Boston University in one of the founding groups of the field. Prof Ellis is now a team leader in the world’s largest synthetic biology project, the Synthetic Yeast Genome (Sc2.0) Project and is Associate Faculty at Synthetic Genomics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, developing synthetic biology tools that can help understand the human genome. At the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology, the Ellis Lab research focuses on design-led synthetic biology and synthetic genomics, especially developing tools to program industrially-relevant microbes with new functions of sensing, logic and control for the sustainable production of biochemicals, cell-based therapies and new materials.