Research Interests

My research group at the Joint BioEnergy Institute is focusing on identifying potential drop-in biofuels and building and optimizing the metabolic pathway to produce these target fuels in microbes. Our major target fuels are isoprenoid-based compounds that can be alternative to gasoline, jet, and diesel fuels. To improve fuel production titer and yield, we study the producing host and fuel biosynthetic pathway intensively using various advanced analytical tools such as targeted proteomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics; and engineer the metabolic pathway in the producing host using synthetic biology tools.