Patrick Westfall completed his PhD in Botany from the University of Georgia in 2001. After post-doctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley he joined Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, California in 2006. While at Amyris, Patrick was a lead scientist for the development a microbial production platform for the anti-malarial compound, Artemisinin. In 2012 Patrick joined Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva) in Indianapolis, Indiana as a group leader for R&D in the Advanced Technology Development group focused on enabling targeted genome editing for agricultural row crops. Patrick is currently a Senior Director of R&D at Zymergen (Emeryville, CA) where he leads a group focused on rapid prototyping of new microbial production hosts for agriculture and industrial applications.