SynBioBeta Speaker
Tim Schnabel
Switch Bioworks
Founder and CEO
Dr. Tim Schnabel is a scientist, bioengineer, entrepreneur, and Forbes 30 under 30 honoree in social impact. He is currently serving as the Founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, a biotechnology company located in San Carlos, California, focused on engineering microbes that produce cost-effective, sustainable fertilizer to tackle climate change.Originally from Germany and Namibia, Tim came to the US to study chemical engineering and economics at Stanford University. Under the guidance of Professor James Swartz, he researched the biological production of hydrogen fuel from sunlight and received Stanford's Kennedy Thesis Prize, the highest university recognition for undergraduate research. Following his early training in biotechnology, Tim pursued a MS and PhD in bioengineering at Stanford, advised by Professor Elizabeth Sattely. Dr. Schnabel’s PhD thesis titled "Engineering Ammonia Production in Free-Living Diazotrophs for Plant Fertilization" is published in two single-author papers and featured on the cover of ACS Synthetic Biology. Tim was also a scholar and teacher of the highly competitive Accel Leadership Fellows, a program that accelerates entrepreneurship training of PhD candidates in engineering. Transitioning through an “Entrepreneur in Training” Postdoc in the Stanford Bioengineering Department Chair’s lab, Professor Jennifer Cochran, Tim founded Switch Bioworks – “the living fertilizer company” – of which he is CEO and on the Board of Directors.In his free time, Tim is a beekeeper, pilot, homebrewer, and author of "Wake up! A young person's guide to spirituality."
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Tim
This Year
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Planetary Health
Lightning Talk Brought to you by Switch Bio
Our industrial economy was built on energy-intensive, centralized manufacturing. The future economy will be grown with biology—making what we need, where we need it, when we need it—with superior unit economics and seamless integration into nature. The bottleneck: biotech has largely been confined to fermenters. Switch Bioworks breaks that constraint by engineering microbes that operate directly in nature—starting with agriculture. Today, 4 billion people depend on expensive synthetic fertilizer for food security—a $200B market. Switch is replacing it with engineered microbes that colonize plant roots and “switch” on fertilizer production precisely when needed. This time-controlled switching architecture solves the tradeoffs that have limited prior biofertilizers and delivers unbeatable unit economics for farmers. Founded by Tim Schnabel, who invented the core technology at Stanford, Switch is led by a world-class team spanning microbial engineering, ag commercialization, IP, and regulatory leadership, with advisors from Corteva, BASF, Syngenta, Nutrien, and leading universities. Switch is preparing to raise a Series A to reach commercialization and lead the Biology on Demand movement. Fertilizer has opened the door, the platform is ready for more.
Get a Ticket
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Planetary Health
Lightning Talk Brought to you by Switch Bio
Our industrial economy was built on energy-intensive, centralized manufacturing. The future economy will be grown with biology—making what we need, where we need it, when we need it—with superior unit economics and seamless integration into nature. The bottleneck: biotech has largely been confined to fermenters. Switch Bioworks breaks that constraint by engineering microbes that operate directly in nature—starting with agriculture. Today, 4 billion people depend on expensive synthetic fertilizer for food security—a $200B market. Switch is replacing it with engineered microbes that colonize plant roots and “switch” on fertilizer production precisely when needed. This time-controlled switching architecture solves the tradeoffs that have limited prior biofertilizers and delivers unbeatable unit economics for farmers. Founded by Tim Schnabel, who invented the core technology at Stanford, Switch is led by a world-class team spanning microbial engineering, ag commercialization, IP, and regulatory leadership, with advisors from Corteva, BASF, Syngenta, Nutrien, and leading universities. Switch is preparing to raise a Series A to reach commercialization and lead the Biology on Demand movement. Fertilizer has opened the door, the platform is ready for more.
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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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