Kevin Solomon

Kevin Solomon

Adjunct - Assistant Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Purdue University
Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering
225 South University Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2093

Research Areas

Systems & Synthetic Biology. Integrated -omics, metabolic engineering & protein engineering for strain and biomolecule development in biotech. Applications in biofuels, value-added chemical production, drug discovery, molecular diagnostics.

Biography

Dr. Kevin Solomon joined the faculty at Purdue in the Spring of 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. His work focuses on the development of sustainable microbial processes to supply the energy, materials, and medicines of tomorrow.

Dr. Solomon earned his Ph.D. at MIT in Chemical Engineering where he developed new tools to reprogram microbial metabolism for biochemical production and examined how cells respond to that intervention. His research and mentorship, at the intersection of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, were recognized with multiple awards including a Lemelson Presidential Fellowship, a NSERC Julie Payette Award, and a Science Education Leadership Award from SynBERC. As a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, he applied the latest advances in sequencing technologies to interrogate how microbes interact with their environment and identify new tools for synthetic biology. Using these techniques, he spearheaded efforts to molecularly characterize in depth a class of elusive microbes with tremendous potential for biofuel production.

Professor Solomon's research program combines both applied and fundamental approaches to better understand the design principles of metabolic flux and gene regulation in microbes, and expand the toolbox for synthetic biology. His research aims to harness these tools and principles to engineer microbes that can robustly adapt to its environment while performing new tasks as chemical factories, microbial computers, and novel therapeutics.

Prospective postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students interested at working at the interface of engineering and biology are encouraged to contact Dr. Solomon about research opportunities in his lab. His publications are available upon request or at Google Scholar.