Bredesen Center Faculty Josh Michener received a DOE Early Career Award, which comes with 5 years of funding, to research Systems Metabolic Engineering of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans for Lignin Valorization.
Dr. Michener did doctoral research in protein and metabolic engineering at Caltech with Christina Smolke and Frances Arnold, receiving a PhD in Bioengineering in 2012. He was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a Nordic Research Fellow with Jens Nielsen at the Chalmers Institute of Technology, and a visiting researcher at Stanford. He then moved to Boston, where he was a Kirschstein Fellow of the NIGMS, studying microbial evolution after horizontal gene transfer with Chris Marx at Harvard Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Eric Alm at MIT Biological Engineering. He came to ORNL as a Wigner Fellow in 2015 and transitioned to a Staff Scientist position in 2018. At ORNL, his team is developing methods to discover and optimize metabolic pathways in microbes.
Dr. Michener’s research and achievements is one more example of the innovation and leadership happening within the Bredesen Center!