Dr. David McMillen

Associate Professor, University of Toronto Mississauga

Email Address: david.mcmillen@utoronto.ca

Bio: We work on (mainly) microbial synthetic biology, investigating ways to create novel solutions to real-world problems with engineered microbes. We pursue several parallel tracks: (1) Combined theoretical and experimental approaches to biological feedback and synthetic implementations of networks that maintain fixed outputs in the face of external disturbances; (2) Expanding the synthetic biology "toolkit" to include novel modes of regulation (including a recruitable T7-based activation system that provides a system to generate programmable, orthogonal sets of transcriptional activators in bacteria); and (3) the motivation for the other two tracks: application to real-world problems including human health in the developed world (working with a multi-PI team on sensing and responding to inflammatory bowel diseases using engineered microbes) and in the developing world (implementing microbe-based antibody detection in blood samples, for low-cost blood screening or diagnosis).

Website: http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/mcmillen-lab/

Twitter: @DaveMcMillen