Rob Dahl is the Head of Fermentation at Ginkgo Bioworks. He earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from University of Colorado, Boulder and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. At Cal, he worked in Jay Keasling's lab designing pathway metabolite responsive expression systems for isoprenoid production as part of the artemisinin project and then biofuels as part of JBEI. From there, he was a Fermentation Scientist at Amyris, primarily working on the Biofene project. His main responsibility was coordinating the Biofene strain screening efforts in 0.5L fermentors and shepherding improved strains through initial process development to the scale up team for transfer to large scale production. After 5 years, he moved to Boston and joined Ginkgo Bioworks. After working with E. coli and S. cerevisiae in the beginning of his career, Ginkgo Bioworks opened the doors to fermentation projects using a wider variety of strains of bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi. As Head of Fermentation, Rob leads a team of Fermentation Engineers and Operations team developing and optimizing processes for projects with applications in flavors and fragrances, agriculture, food, and Covid-19 response to name a few.