SynBioBeta Speaker
Tim Schnabel
Switch Bioworks
Founder and CEO
Dr. Tim Schnabel is the Founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, a venture-backed biotechnology company engineering microbes to produce nitrogen fertilizer directly on plant roots. Fertilizer is one of agriculture’s largest costs and environmental challenges, underpinning global food production while contributing over a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions annually. Tim’s work focuses on solving the core unit-economics and technical challenges that have historically limited agricultural biologicals — enabling products that can replace large amounts of synthetic fertilizer at a fraction of the cost. He spent over a decade at Stanford studying engineering, economics, and entrepreneurship, where he invented the company’s founding technology. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he is building the foundation for “Biology on Demand,” where engineered microbes manufacture essential products where and when they are needed.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Tim
This Year
•
-
Planetary Health
Fertilizer Feeds the World. It’s Time to Reinvent it with Biology
Modern agriculture runs on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—a system that feeds the world, but depends on energy-intensive production and fragile global supply chains. Every few years, a crisis reminds us how vulnerable it is. Biology has long promised an alternative, but making nitrogen-fixing microbes work reliably in the field has remained one of the hardest challenges in synthetic biology. At Switch Bioworks, we’re taking a new approach: engineering microbial systems that dynamically control nitrogen release directly on plant roots. This talk will cover what has held the field back, what’s changing now, and how biology could fundamentally reshape one of the largest industries on Earth. It's time to reinvent fertilizer. Its time to Switch.
•
-
Planetary Health
Fertilizer Feeds the World. It’s Time to Reinvent it with Biology
Modern agriculture runs on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—a system that feeds the world, but depends on energy-intensive production and fragile global supply chains. Every few years, a crisis reminds us how vulnerable it is. Biology has long promised an alternative, but making nitrogen-fixing microbes work reliably in the field has remained one of the hardest challenges in synthetic biology. At Switch Bioworks, we’re taking a new approach: engineering microbial systems that dynamically control nitrogen release directly on plant roots. This talk will cover what has held the field back, what’s changing now, and how biology could fundamentally reshape one of the largest industries on Earth. It's time to reinvent fertilizer. Its time to Switch.
Session lineup still growing
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
•
-
Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
