Professor Huimin Zhao has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 Charles D. Scott Award from the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. This award is given annually in recognition of outstanding research contributions in biotechnology for the production of fuels and chemicals.
Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his research interests focus on the interface of synthetic biology, machine learning and laboratory automation. Zhao’s research program focuses on four distinct yet related areas: foundational tool development, drug discovery and development, industrial biotechnology, and mammalian synthetic biology.
In addition to his position at Illinois, Zhao is director of the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Molecule Synthesis (moleculemaker.org) and Editor in Chief of ACS Synthetic Biology. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 and, prior to joining Illinois in 2000, was a project leader at the Industrial Biotechnology Laboratory of the Dow Chemical Company.
The award will be presented at the 46th Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.