TEAM » KEVIN
Principal Investigator
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Kevin V. Solomon, Ph.D.
Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Career Development Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Trainer, Chemistry-Biology Interface NIH T32 Program Trainer, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Data Science (i3-CBB) T32 Program Trainer, Microbiology Graduate Program Faculty Affiliate, Center for Plastics Innovation Affiliated Faculty, Delaware Biotechnology Institute Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering University of Delaware 150 Academy St [email protected] CV |
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Education
Postdoc Chemical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 2012 - 2015 Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2012 M.S. Chemical Engineering Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008 B. Eng. Chemical Engineering & Bioengineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, 2006 Biography
Dr. Kevin Solomon moved to UD in the January 2021 from Purdue University. His work is driven by the promise of sustainable microbial processes to supply the energy, materials, and medicines of tomorrow. Spanning the gamut from academic bench scale science to industrial process development in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical sectors, Dr. Solomon has worked at various scales and stages of industrial biotechnology. 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. |
Selected Awards & Honors
2025 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE) 2023 AIChE Division 15 Early Career Award 2023 Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award 2023 ACS BIOT Young Investigator Award 2022 Microorganisms Young Investigator Award 2022 Invited Speaker at National Academy of Engineering (NAE) 2022 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium 2022 SIMB Early Career Award 2022 NSF CAREER Award 2021 Invited participant to the NAE 2021 German – American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium 2020 Named to the 1000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America by Cell Mentor 2019 Congressional testimony before the 116th US Congress 2019 US Department of Energy Early Career Award 2019 Teaching for Tomorrow Fellow, Purdue University 2018 Most Outstanding Faculty, Purdue University Residences |