UCSD bioengineering grad student wins leader...( The plastic containers Adam Feist us...)

The plastic containers Adam Feist uses to carry his lunch to his UC San Diego lab are petroleum based. This may change. Feist a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD is doing fundamental research that could lead to more efficient ways to churn out renewable biopolymers for green plastics using microorganisms as factories. Within the bioengineering department at UCSDs Jacobs School of Engineering, Feist is a natural leader, a dedicated team player and a top-notch metabolic engineer. This combination of leadership, service and scholarship has earned him the 2007 Woolley Leadership Award.

In particular, Feist tinkers with the metabolisms of strains of E. coli. He is studying how the genomes of microorganism can be systematically modified in order to make them highly efficient factories for the production of all sorts of useful things, including amino acids, ethanol, biopolymers and a wide range of platform chemicals that can be used to make many commercially valuable chemicals and products.

Listen to Adam Feist explain how a job at a rubber factory led him to switch from chemical engineering to bioengineering. http://cse-ece-ucsd.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-came-to-grad-school.html

In addition to his leadership activities, Adams research accomplishments are outstanding. Adam led a multi-institution effort with four groups worldwide and effectively produced an outstanding end product and a great paper in the Nature Journal - Molecular Systems Biology, said Bernhard Palsson, who is Feists thesis advisor and a bioengineering professor at UCSD.

Up to this point, Adam has published three peer-reviewed publications. He was the primary author on two and all have been in very respectable Nature Group journals. He has two more publications in the review process and more in the pipeline before his expected graduation early next fall.

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