Laura Crowell is a Director in Integrated Process Development at Sunflower Therapeutics PBC, a biotech startup focused on dramatically reducing the time and cost to develop and manufacture biologics for patients around the world. In her current role, Laura oversees ongoing efforts to develop right-sized and efficient manufacturing approaches for protein-based therapeutics and vaccines using strain engineering, integrated process development, and automated multi-product facilities.
Laura received her Ph.D. (2020) and M.S. (2015) in Chemical Engineering from MIT and her B.S. (2014) in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Tufts University. Her doctoral work accelerated process development for biologics on a small-scale, integrated, multi-product manufacturing platform. This involved the demonstration of an automated, small-scale biomanufacturing system for the rapid, end-to-end production of clinical quality biopharmaceuticals along with the development and optimization of processes for the integrated, straight-through purification of biologics.