James Liao

Title: Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Chair in Chemical Engineering
Office: University of California, Los Angeles

Rewiring Metabolism

 

Abstract: The key metabolic pathways, the enzymes involved, and their reaction mechanisms were largely elucidated through a collection of efforts in the 20th century. Since then, metabolism has often been neglected as a field of solved problem attracting little attention. With the growing understanding of biochemical functions of the cells and the organisms, time is ripe for re-thinking and re-designing the metabolic pathways to solve problems in energy and medicine. These two seemingly unrelated fields are surprisingly linked at the level of metabolism. Efficient energy metabolism is both crucial to the biological production of fuels as well as managing obesity, cancer metabolism, and brain function. In this talk, we will discuss how fundamental metabolic pathways can be re-designed to afford efficient biofuel production. We will attempt to derive principles of metabolic engineering in both computational and experimental aspects.

Jim Liao is the Parsons Foundation Professor and Department Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. He received his BS at National Taiwan University and his PhD under Ed Lightfoot at UW-Madison. He is a member of NAE and NAS, and Academician, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.