Division Director Blake Simmons announced that he has named Aindrila Mukhopadhyay as the new Deputy for Science of the Biological Systems and Engineering Division, effective Monday, December 6, 2021. She is taking over for Susan Celniker, a senior scientist and co-Director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project who served as the Division Deputy for five years.
Mukhopadhyay is a senior scientist and recognized subject matter expert in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. She is the Vice President of the Biofuels and Bioproducts Division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Additionally, she is a principal investigator in the Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes Molecular Assemblies (ENIGMA) Scientific Focus Area.
Her research is focused on developing tools to examine and engineer a variety of microbial platforms including P. putida, C. glutamicum, E. coli, R. toruloides, S. cerevisiae, and other microbial strains and specifically focuses on developing robust strains that show high tolerance and productivity during biofuel and chemical production, and the optimization required to achieve scalability.
Mukhopadhyay first joined Berkeley Lab in 2003 as a joint postdoctoral researcher with UC Berkeley in microbiology and systems biology and was hired as a scientist in the Biosciences Area in 2004. She received a Master’s degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago.
