Eric M. Young is the Leonard P. Kinnicutt Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at WPI and an NSF CAREER awardee. His research goal is to understand and engineer novel microbial systems that improve the human condition. This includes development of cell factories and understanding how fungi and bacteria interact in microbiomes. This interdisciplinary research spans the fields of metabolic engineering, protein engineering, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics. This research also informs his educational goal - to train the current and future workforce for an economy shaped by engineered biology.
Dr. Young received undergraduate degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering from the University of Maine at Orono. Dr. Young completed his doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin. Funded in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, he used directed evolution to engineer yeast membrane transporters. He went on to do postdoctoral research at the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT. There, he developed new strategies for part and pathway engineering in yeast.