Quentin Dudley will be an assistant professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in January 2024 where his lab will build tools for cell-free and plant-based bioproduction of molecules. He completed his PhD in the lab of Michael Jewett at Northwestern University where he developed an in vitro prototyping platform for assembling/optimizing multi-step enzyme pathways. As a postdoc at Earlham Institute / John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK under the joint mentorship of Nicola Patron and Sarah O’Connor, Quentin used CRISPR-Cas9-based genome engineering to improve the wild tobacco Nicotiana benthamiana as a chassis for the bioproduction of medicinal proteins and metabolites. Quentin's recent experience includes time at the synthetic biology start-up Calyxt who is engineering bioreactor-based plant cells to produce cosmetic, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical ingredients and Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit that runs coordinated research programs to unlock materials and manufacturing technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions.