Dr. Kevin Solomon moved to UD in the January 2021 from Purdue University. His work is driven by the promise of sustainable microbial processes to supply the energy, materials, and medicines of tomorrow. Spanning the gamut from academic bench scale science to industrial process development in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical sectors, Dr. Solomon has worked at various scales and stages of industrial biotechnology.
Dr. Solomon earned his Ph.D. at MIT in Chemical Engineering where he developed new tools to reprogram microbial metabolism for biochemical production and examined how cells respond to that intervention. His research and mentorship, at the intersection of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, were recognized with multiple awards including a Lemelson Presidential Fellowship, a NSERC Julie Payette Award, and a Science Education Leadership Award from SynBERC. As a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, he applied the latest advances in sequencing technologies to interrogate how microbes interact with their environment and identify new tools for synthetic biology. Using these techniques, he spearheaded efforts to molecularly characterize in depth a class of elusive microbes with tremendous potential for biofuel production.
Professor Solomon's research program combines both applied and fundamental approaches to better understand the design principles of metabolic flux and gene regulation in microbes, and expand the toolbox for synthetic biology. His research aims to harness these tools and principles to engineer microbes that can robustly adapt to its environment while performing new tasks as chemical factories, microbial computers, and novel therapeutics.