Native and Engineered Microorganisms for Chemical Synthesis Seminar

Stephen is originally from the small village of Thornhill in Dumfries and Galloway. He began his undergraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 2008 with a MChem in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry (1st in class). During this time, he also spent 12 months working as a medicinal chemist for GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. In 2008, Stephen moved to the University of Oxford to pursue a DPhil in Organic Chemistry with Prof. Martin D. Smith, where he worked on the total synthesis of frog toxin alkaloids. In 2012, Stephen moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge to take up a Career Development Fellowship in the laboratory of Prof. Jason Chin. Whilst here, he developed a range of strain-promoted Diels-Alder click reactions for the site-sepcific labeling of proteins in E. coli using AMBER stop-codon suppression. In 2014, he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University on a Marie Curie International Fellowship, where he joined the laboratory of Prof. Emily Balskus. At Harvard, he developed the use of abiotic, non-enzymatic reactions for use with metabolically engineered microbes for renewable chemical synthesis. During this time, he also spent six months as a visiting fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, hosted by Prof. Kristala Prather. In 2016, he carried out the Return Phase of his Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in the laboratory of Prof. Steve Ley.
 
In 2017, Stephen joined the Institute for Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology (IQB3) at the University of Edinburgh as Lecturer in Biotechnology, where his independent lab explores scientific opportunities at the interface of synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology. In 2019, he was seconded to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Prof. Frances Arnold on the directed evolution of enzymes. Most recently, Stephen was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to continue his work on the combined use of chemical catalysts and engineered microbes for synthetic chemistry.