Kristala Jones Prather, the Theodore T. Miller Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded permanent tenure at MIT. An investigator in MIT’s multi-institutional Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, Prather’s research combines metabolic engineering with the practices of biocatalysis to expand and optimize the biosynthetic capacities of microbial systems. She is on the faculty of the MIT Portugal Program’s (MPP) bioengineering section, and she serves on the advisory board of MIT’s Office of Engineering Outreach Programs. She earned her BS and PhD at MIT and the Univ. of California, Berkeley, respectively.