Dr. Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and director of NSF AI Institute for Molecule Synthesis. He received his B.S. degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Dr. Frances Arnold. Prior to joining UIUC in 2000, he was a project leader at the Industrial Biotechnology Laboratory of the Dow Chemical Company. He was promoted to full professor in 2008. Dr. Zhao has authored and co-authored over 380 research articles and over 30 issued and pending patent applications with several being licensed by industry. In addition, he has given over 430 plenary, keynote, or invited lectures. Thirty-one (31) of his former graduate students and postdocs became professors or principal investigators in the United States (9), China (Mainland 16, Taiwan 1), Korea (2), Singapore (2), and Egypt (1). Dr. Zhao received numerous research and teaching awards and honors such as ECI Enzyme Engineering Award (2019), Marvin Johnson Award (2018), and Charles Thom Award (2016). His primary research interests are in the development and applications of synthetic biology, machine learning, and laboratory automation tools to address society’s most daunting challenges in health, energy, and sustainability.