Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos received his degrees in chemical engineering (B.S.: NTU Athens, M.S.: University of Florida, Ph.D.: University of Minnesota, 1978). He taught at Caltech (1978-85) after which he was appointed Professor of ChE at MIT. He served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (1990-97) and is also the Taplin Professor of HST (2001-), Instructor of Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School (1997-), and the W. H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Professor Stephanopoulos' current research focuses on metabolic engineering, the engineering of microbes for the production of fuels and chemicals. He has co-authored or -edited 5 books, ~300 papers and 25 patents and supervised more than 100 graduate and post-doctoral students. He is presently the editor-in-chief of Metabolic Engineering and serves on the Editorial Boards of 7 scientific journals and the Advisory Boards of 5 ChE departments. He has been recognized with numerous awards (Dreyfus, Excellence in Teaching-Caltech, AIChE Technical Achievement Award, PYI, AIChE-FPBE Division Award, M.J. Johnson Award of ACS, Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering, C. Thom Award of SIM, the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of AIChE). In 2002 he was elected to the AIChE Board of Directors, in 2003 to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and in 2005 was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark. In 2007 he won the C. Thom Award from SIM and the Founders Award from AIChE and in 2009 the Amgen award in Biochemical Engineering.

Professor Stephanopoulos has taught undergraduate and graduate courses of the core of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Caltech and MIT and co-authored the first textbook on Metabolic Engineering. He is presently directing a research group of approximately 25 researchers.