SynBioBeta Speaker
Blake Simmons
LBNL
Dir. Bio. Sys & Engg
Blake Simmons is a senior scientific leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he serves as Director of the Biological Systems & Engineering Division. His work focuses on integrating biology, chemistry, and engineering to enable biomanufacturing and the production of affordable and scalable biofuels and bioproducts. Blake is the Chief Science and Technology Officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI, jbei.org), where he has driven advances in biomass deconstruction and conversion. He is widely recognized for translating fundamental science into scalable technologies and for bridging national-lab innovation with commercialization and deployment and is the co-founder of three startups.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Blake
This Year
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Biomanufacturing
Full Stack Bio: How Can Biotech Collaborate to Achieve Scale with Competitive COGS
Scaling bio-based products requires integrated technical collaboration across strain engineering, fermentation, downstream processing, and analytics. Full-stack approaches—where startups, CDMOs, and platform technology providers align early on—can optimize yield, reduce variability, and lower cost of goods (COGS) at commercial scale. This session explores case studies of cross-company collaboration, from co-development of microbial strains and bioreactor designs to shared process analytics and predictive modeling. Hear how teams are breaking down technical silos to accelerate scale-up, improve reproducibility, and create competitive, sustainable manufacturing solutions that bring synthetic biology products from the lab to the market efficiently.
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Featuring
Jamie Bacher
Huxley Project
Principal
Ag-biotech veteran guiding tech to market.
Babu Raman
Corteva Agriscience
External Collab. Portfolio Leader
Colby Adolph
Evonik
Sales Director
Fermentation scale-up connector: turning prototypes into manufacturable reality
Ling Li
ADM
Dir. Market Dev., Prec. Ferm.
Precision fermentation dealmaker bridging startups, scale, and brands
Eric Lee
Primient
Director, B&D - Fermentation
Blake Simmons
LBNL
Dir. Bio. Sys & Engg
Ionic-liquid biomass deconstruction pioneer; National Academy of Inventors fellow.
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Biomanufacturing
Full Stack Bio: How Can Biotech Collaborate to Achieve Scale with Competitive COGS
Scaling bio-based products requires integrated technical collaboration across strain engineering, fermentation, downstream processing, and analytics. Full-stack approaches—where startups, CDMOs, and platform technology providers align early on—can optimize yield, reduce variability, and lower cost of goods (COGS) at commercial scale. This session explores case studies of cross-company collaboration, from co-development of microbial strains and bioreactor designs to shared process analytics and predictive modeling. Hear how teams are breaking down technical silos to accelerate scale-up, improve reproducibility, and create competitive, sustainable manufacturing solutions that bring synthetic biology products from the lab to the market efficiently.
Get a Ticket
Featuring
Jamie Bacher
Huxley Project
Principal
Ag-biotech veteran guiding tech to market.
Babu Raman
Corteva Agriscience
External Collab. Portfolio Leader
Colby Adolph
Evonik
Sales Director
Fermentation scale-up connector: turning prototypes into manufacturable reality
Ling Li
ADM
Dir. Market Dev., Prec. Ferm.
Precision fermentation dealmaker bridging startups, scale, and brands
Eric Lee
Primient
Director, B&D - Fermentation
Blake Simmons
LBNL
Dir. Bio. Sys & Engg
Ionic-liquid biomass deconstruction pioneer; National Academy of Inventors fellow.
Session lineup still growing
Get a Ticket
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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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?
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
