SynBioBeta Speaker
Karen Warner
BEAM Circular
Founder & CEO
Karen Warner is the Founder and CEO of BEAM Circular, a hub for circular bioeconomy innovation in California’s agricultural heartland that is working to create good jobs and scale environmental solutions at the intersections of biotechnology, agriculture, and manufacturing. Karen began her career in global health, building health system strengthening programs in the US and East Africa. She went on to serve in a variety of nonprofit, governmental, and private sector roles focused on scaling social impact and public-private partnerships, including at Emerson Collective in Palo Alto, in the Office of the Governor of Colorado, and at medical device company Medtronic in Minneapolis. In 2018 she moved back to the San Joaquin Valley of California, where she was born and raised, and served as District Chief of Staff for a United States Congressional Representative prior to launching BEAM Circular. Karen has a BA in Human Biology and MBA from Stanford University, and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Karen
This Year
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Biomanufacturing
Beyond Batch: What Will Unlock the Next Generation of Fermentation?
Conventional batch fermentation has long been the backbone of industrial biotechnology — but a new wave of platforms is challenging that paradigm. From continuous and gas fermentation to novel feedstock integration, emerging approaches promise greater efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. So what's actually holding them back, and what will it take to move them forward? This panel brings together practitioners and innovators working at the frontier of alternative fermentation systems to explore the enablers, accelerators, and real-world lessons shaping the path ahead. Rather than debating which technology "wins," we'll examine the shared challenges across platforms: navigating the pilot-to-commercial scale-up journey, working with non-traditional feedstocks, and building the infrastructure and partnerships that turn promising science into viable processes. Whether you're deep in the lab or making investment and deployment decisions, this conversation will surface concrete insights on what's needed — technically, operationally, and systemically — to unlock the next generation of fermentation.
Get a Ticket
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Biomanufacturing
Beyond Batch: What Will Unlock the Next Generation of Fermentation?
Conventional batch fermentation has long been the backbone of industrial biotechnology — but a new wave of platforms is challenging that paradigm. From continuous and gas fermentation to novel feedstock integration, emerging approaches promise greater efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. So what's actually holding them back, and what will it take to move them forward? This panel brings together practitioners and innovators working at the frontier of alternative fermentation systems to explore the enablers, accelerators, and real-world lessons shaping the path ahead. Rather than debating which technology "wins," we'll examine the shared challenges across platforms: navigating the pilot-to-commercial scale-up journey, working with non-traditional feedstocks, and building the infrastructure and partnerships that turn promising science into viable processes. Whether you're deep in the lab or making investment and deployment decisions, this conversation will surface concrete insights on what's needed — technically, operationally, and systemically — to unlock the next generation of fermentation.
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Session lineup still growing
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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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Speaker Coming Soon
