Manu Pillai
Manu Pillai has over 30 years’ experience working in global technology, across market development, systems architecture, and team building. His technical management experience encompasses electrical, mechanical/ID, manufacturing, test, applications, and analytics across multiple successes – and failures. He founded CarbonBridge to reduce the cost of key molecules, ending up with bioconversion through first principles approaches. That lead to the development of the game-changing CarbonBridge bioreactor with support from ARPA-E.
CarbonBridge
Lunch & Learn - Ordering Off-Menu: Microbes for the New Bioeconomy (ends at 1:00)
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From acid-loving metal munchers to photosynthetic cyanobacteria and microbiome consortia, non-model microbes are already quietly tackling problems that conventional hosts can’t touch. Join a fast-paced lunch-and-learn where leaders in strain development, fermentation, and microbial applications discuss how we can best build a flourishing bioeconomy.We will map the opportunity landscape across food, fuels, therapeutics, agriculture, biomining and planetary terraforming, and discuss practical hurdles like genetic tractability, scale-up, and regulatory paths. Attendees will leave with a field guide to promising clades, toolkits, and collaboration models that can turn today’s “wild types” into tomorrow’s workhorses.
