Weston Kightlinger

Weston is currently the Head of Cell-free Protein Synthesis at Resilience where his group focuses on using cell-free systems to accelerate drug development and clinical biomanufacturing, particularly for proteins that are difficult to express in traditional cell-based production hosts. Prior to its acquisition by Resilience in December 2021, Weston was cofounder and CTO of SwiftScale Biologics, which commercialized and built out facilities to support a suite of advanced cell-free manufacturing methods spun out of Northwestern and Cornell Universities. Weston earned his PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and completed his post-doctoral work at Northwestern University working with Prof. Mike Jewett to rapidly design, build, and test protein glycosylation pathways by combining cell-free systems with high-throughput mass spectrometry. Weston has also completed bioengineering research at the University of Tulsa (his undergraduate institution where he studied chemical engineering), University of Copenhagen, TU Kaiserslautern, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.