🧪 What I'm working on now
Three active projects
Redirecting carbon into valuable plant chemistry
Aromatic compounds, the family behind vanillin, morphine and indigo, all descend from one upstream route, and the carbon reaching it sets a ceiling on everything downstream. I am investigating how additional assimilated carbon can be channelled through metabolism towards those compounds instead of back into ordinary growth.
How it worksNew synthetic biology project
Developing a new synthetic biology project with collaborators in the UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry, asking what new behaviours can be built into plant cells.
Details pending.
Research directionNatural Red Pigments
Exploring whether engineered soybean could become a production platform for natural red pigments, as an alternative to synthetic colourants such as Red 40. Part biology, part customer discovery, part working out whether the idea holds up outside the greenhouse.
Inside the exploration🤔 The thread
The questions behind the work
Different projects and different organisms, connected by the same underlying questions.
How do unusual enzymes create new plant chemistry?
Most valuable plant molecules are built by enzymes nobody has found yet, and the assumptions about where to look are narrower than they should be.
How can metabolism be redirected towards useful molecules?
A plant decides at a few branch points what it makes and how much. Find those points and you can change the answer.
What new behaviours can synthetic biology build into plant cells?
Beyond adding a pathway: getting a plant cell to do something it has never done before, on cue.
What does it take to turn interesting biology into something useful?
Yield, extraction, stability, crop choice, cost and whoever is meant to buy it. Usually the part that decides whether any of it matters.
🔴 Venture exploration
Natural Red Pigments
Whether engineered soybean could supply the red colour that is currently made from petrochemicals.
Red 40 (Allura Red AC) puts the red in a great deal of the food supply. The idea we are exploring is to engineer soybean to make betalains instead, the pigments that turn beetroot red, so the colour is harvested with the crop. Soybean matters because it is already planted, harvested, crushed and processed at a scale almost no speciality crop can match.
It is an exploration rather than a company: the science is in progress, and so is the work of finding out whether anybody would actually buy the result.
- StatusEarly-stage venture exploration. Not an incorporated company.
- What I doLead the customer discovery and commercialisation thinking, and work on the biology.
- RecognitionWARF Award, 2025.
- ProgrammeNSF I-Corps, as Entrepreneurial Lead, interviewing the food, beauty and plant processing sectors.
- Open questionsYield, pigment stability, extraction, and whether the economics survive contact with a real formulator.
📌 Credentials
Selected evidence
🎤 Communication
Speaking, writing and editorial work
I am Research Highlights Editor at The Plant Journal, a continuing editorial position, and I speak regularly to scientific, industry and general audiences.
- Jul 2026
New Phytologist Editor-in-Chief Symposium Talk
Tartu, Estonia
- Jun 2026
Phytochemical Society of North America Workshop facilitator
Madison, Wisconsin · commercialisation workshop
- Nov 2025
University of Minnesota Duluth Invited seminar
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
✍️ Blog
Latest posts
Papers, conferences, career thinking and travel.
👋 Connect
Three good reasons to get in touch
- Research collaborations
Plant specialised metabolism, enzyme discovery, metabolic engineering and synthetic biology in plants.
- Commercialisation and industry
Natural colourants, plant-made ingredients, technology translation, and anyone who has taken a plant-derived ingredient to market.
- Speaking and media
Conferences, seminars, workshops, podcasts and press. There is a speaker kit ready to go.