with Dr Bruce Lichtenstein

Plastics have revolutionised our way of living owing to their durability and weight. These same factors have made them recalcitrant pollutants as our convenience has become a dependency, and limitations in our waste recovery schemes have allowed plastics to escape into the environment. We are working towards valorising plastic waste through identifying and engineering biotechnological means of recovering the constituent parts of plastics and approaches towards increasing the value of these pieces. I will highlight recent progress our team and others have made in understanding how plastic degrading enzymes work, how this helps us improve the engineering and identification of new enzymes for a broader range of plastics, and what steps we need to take towards a more sustainable relationship with synthetic polymers.

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I graduated with a BA in Biochemistry (Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa) from Swarthmore College, USA, in 2002. I subsequently joined the group of Professor P. Les Dutton, FRS, at the University of Pennsylvania for my graduate research on the chemistry of non-natural, organic, redox cofactors in manually designed proteins and completed my PhD in Biochemistry and Macromolecular Biophysics in 2010.  My research career continued in Les’s group until I moved to the Chemical Biology Department at the University of Oxford to join Professor Ben G. Davis’s group in 2012 to study protein chemistry. After a year in Oxford, I joined Professor Birte Höcker’s Protein Design Group at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. There, I initiated several projects focusing on new protein-based tools for macromolecular delivery into eukaryotic cells and creating new cofactor-binding chimeric proteins. I joined the Centre for Enzyme Innovation (CEI) at the University of Portsmouth in the fall of 2019 as a Senior Research Fellow. Since joining the CEI, I have been the protein design lead for the Centre's work on plastic degrading enzymes, using protein design to examine and improve the biocatalytic conversion of polymers to their constituent parts. I am on the management board of the recently funded plastics-focused P3EB UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Hub. I lead a team developing new electronic circuitry within proteins designed from scratch.

Last Updated on 7th January 2025