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General Information and Fees
Biochemical and Molecular Engineering XVII
Emerging Frontiers
An ECI Conference Series
June 26-30, 2011
Seattle, Washington, USA
2011 Amgen Biochemical
Engineering Award Winner
Professor Jens Nielsen
Chalmers University of Technology
 Jens
Nielsen has been making significant contributions to the field of Biochemical
Engineering since he started working in the field 25 years ago. Jens
has been involved in almost every aspect in research and development
in Biochemical Engineering. He represents the best of biochemical engineering
as his approaches have combined development of experimental tools, analytical
technologies, quantitative frameworks, and systems engineering methodologies.
.
Three aspects of his professional career distinguish
Jens:
- He has made
significant contributions and he has advanced basic and applied research
in four of the most complex and the most important microorganisms:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Asperigillus niger, Penicillium chrysogenum,
and lactic acid bacteria. Jens has been the leader in the biochemical
engineering of these organisms. In his work using these organisms,
he developed and employed innovative experimental, modeling, and computational
methodologies, and he demonstrated how these methods can be used in
metabolic engineering and bioprocess development for the production
of biochemical, pharmaceuticals, and nutraceuticals.
- He has made
contributions in almost every aspect of bioprocess technology: from
upstream to downstream process development, from genetics to physiology
and bioreactor performance, from process monitoring to transcriptomics
and metabolomics. Actually, he is one of the handful of people in
the field of biochemical engineering who made significant contributions
in so many different areas of the field.
- He has pioneered
the integration of systems engineering methods and approaches for
the study of complex biological systems. What characterizes his approaches
and contributions is the rigorous application of quantitative experimental
methods from transcriptomics, to metabolomics and flux analysis. And
his major impact comes from the development of novel mathematical
and computational methods, to fruitfully and productively analyze
the information from these methods.
Jens started his research career with the development
of advanced analytical systems for on-line monitoring of microbial fermentations
and the use of hereby obtained data for detailed mathematical modeling
of growth and product formation of different cell factories. These activities
naturally evolved into studying metabolic pathways in greater details,
and his group therefore started to incorporate tools from molecular
biology in order to analyze microbial cells in greater details and to
be able to perform directed genetic modifications with the objective
to improve the properties of industrially important microorganisms.
With the development of genomics and functional genomics, he looked
into exploiting how tools from this research field can be used in industrial
biotechnology, and this established him as a leader in the emerging
field of systems biology.
Today
his group is one of the largest academic research groups in the field
of systems biology of industrial microorganisms. His research activities
focus on mapping of molecular interactions in microbial cells through
the combination of molecular biology, detailed physiological studies
and mathematical modeling. This work is driven by the objective to improve
the properties of cell factories used for the biotechnological production
of fuels, fine chemicals, food ingredients, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals
through metabolic engineering.
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