Stephen Van Dien, PhD, is the cofounder and CTO of Persephone Biosciences. He is an expert in the areas of metabolic engineering, industrial microbiology, systems biology, and microbial fermentation, and he has numerous publications and patents in those areas. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of California, Berkeley under the direction of Jay Keasling. After two postdoctoral positions, he began a 13-year career at Genomatica, where he developed approaches to integrate metabolic models with experimental data and applied them to the development of microbes for bioprocessing. He then led a team to develop a process for the production of 1,4-butanediol (BDO) from sugars, now a commercial product, and received the Presidential Green Chemistry Award in 2011. In addition, he was president of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB) in 2018–2019.