Dr. Blenner is an Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. Prior to that, he was the McQueen Quattlebaum Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson University. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University in 2009 and completed three years of postdoctoral training as an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow and an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. In addition to winning the 2022 Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award, he won the 2021 ACS BIOT Young Investigator Award, the 2020 South Carolina Governor’s Young Scientist Award for Excellence in Scientific Research, the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2019 Clemson University Junior Researcher of the Year, and Young Faculty Awards from DARPA, NIH, NASA and the Air Force. His research broadly addresses engineering biomolecular and cellular systems for the production of fuels, chemicals, enzymes, biopharmaceuticals and biosensors. Some of the common threads across his lab’s current work are around using microbes for enabling a circular economy and addressing biomanufacturing-related problems arising from cell line design.