Nature has been making almost anything you can think of, cleanly and at scale, for billions of years. When we engineer biology, we’re extending something nature has done all along, adding to the evolutionary inventory.
Today our chemicals, materials and fuels mostly come from oil, made in ways that leave a lot of toxic residue behind. Biology can make the same things, the clothes you wear, the fuel in your car, the molecules in your medicine, grown by cells working as tiny factories. That is a different way to make the things modern life runs on, more in line with how nature produces things, and with a far lower footprint on the planet.
The science is hard. Getting it to scale, and getting the world to take it up, is even harder. That gap, between what biology can do and what reaches us, is where I work.
No technology only does good, biology included. The real question isn’t just what we can build, but what we choose to build, and how. Doing this well means building the right culture, rules and trust to use it wisely, not as a constraint on the work but as part of it.
I am excited that we increasingly have the tools to make what we need without using up the planet. That’s the future I want to help build.
Getting a biobased product into real life takes more than the innovation itself. It also takes a world that’s ready to take it up. That’s why I work on both.
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I love talking and interacting with different people, from leading experts to people who've never thought about biology as a technology.
18+ international executive programs across the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Silicon Valley.
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