Team:Wisconsin-Madison/teamadvisors

Brian Pfleger PhD.:

Brian Pfleger received his PhD after studying in the laboratory of Jay D. Keasling at Cal-Berkeley where he developed metabolic engineering methods to enhance the biosynthesis of pharmaceuticals. This experience trained him to design, construct and evaluate strains of Escherichia coli for the production of small molecules by integrating synthetic and systems biology. After graduating, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship (NIH-GLRCE) in the laboratory of David H. Sherman at the University of Michigan, where he studied six Bacillus anthracis enzymes and how they assembled a complex natural product essential for iron acquisition and pathogenesis. Research in the Sherman lab exposed him to the combinatorial nature of natural product biosynthesis and taught him how to work with these novel enzymes. His current interest is engineering sustainable chemical production using synthetic biology.

Tyler Youngquist:

Tyler Youngquist is a PhD student in the Pfleger lab at UW-Madison in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He is working with large scale fermentations to produce valuable small molecules such as fatty acids with metabolically engineered strains of E. coli. He helped answer the iGEM team's myriad questions over the summer, and provided them with invaluable goodies like plasmids, cells, and fluorescent markers.