Leopold Green, assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and principal investigator of Green Research Lab, has been named to MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” list. This is the 25th year for this prestigious list of highly accomplished young people who are using technology to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems and explore open scientific questions.

Green’s research centers on designing and building biological controllers as therapeutic agents for host-microbiome modulation, driven by his passion for addressing chronic inflammation and associated diseases. He joined the Purdue faculty in 2021 after working in industry as a technical consultant for Holoclara, an R&D project manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific-One Lambda and as an R&D process chemistry intern at Merck & Co.

As Principal Investigator for Green Research Lab, he and his team are revolutionizing synthetic biology by engineering DNA nanopores to transform bacteria and probe neural activity. His lab has discovered that non-functionalized DNA nanostructures can robustly and isothermally embed themselves into cell membranes, a pioneering achievement in synthetic biology.

Green received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Hampton University, Virginia, in 2011, and a PhD in bioengineering from the University of California Riverside in 2016. He is the recipient of an NSF California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate Fellow, a 2020 Rising Star in Engineering in Medicine from Columbia University and a 2021 Black Trailblazer in Engineering Fellow award from Purdue University.