Danielle Tullman-Ercek is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University, Co-Director of the NU Center for Synthetic Biology, and Director of the Master of Science in Biotechnology Program. She is also Director of SynBREU, which is the first NSF-funded Synthetic Biology undergraduate research program. Outside of Northwestern, she was also a founding council member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, serves as an Editor for mSystems, and is active in the American Chemical Society Biochemical Technology Division. She is also co-founder of a company, Opera Bioscience, which is built on her research innovations related to biomanufacturing. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco and the Joint Bioenergy Institute, while part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Tullman-Ercek’s research focuses on building biomolecular devices for a wide range of applications, including energy, materials, manufacturing, and medicine. She is particularly interested in engineering multi-protein complexes, such as virus capsids and the machines that transport proteins and small molecules across cellular membranes. She received several awards for this work, including the Searle Leadership Award, an NSF CAREER award, and the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award, and she was inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2023.