Mattheos Koffas is the Dorothy and Fred Chau ’71 Endowed Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He received his PhD from MIT in 2001 under the supervision of Gregory Stephanopoulos where he worked on amino acid production from Corynebacterium glutamicum. He was a Visiting Research Scientist at DuPont Central Research from 2001 to 2002 where he worked on methanotrophic bacteria and identified a pyrophosphate-dependent central carbon metabolism, resulting in nine patents.
He then joined the University at Buffalo as Assistant Professor and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2008. Since 2011, he has been a member of the faculty at Rensselaer. He works in the field of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology with particular emphasis on the biosynthesis of natural products.
He pioneered the development of recombinant production platforms of numerous plant-derived chemicals, and introduced a number of novel concepts in synthetic biology, including the dynamic regulation of metabolic pathways and the use of engineered microbial consortia for the production of complex molecules. In the past 10 years, he has expanded his research interests in animal natural products and sustainability.
He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals in his field and hold more than 15 patents, several of which have been commercialized, while he is the co-founder of SynApp Bio, a company focusing on combining electricity with cell-free metabolic engineering.
He is co-Editor in Chief of Metabolic Engineering Communications and Editor of Biotechnology Advances. He currently serves on the editorial board of several Journals.