Tom Ellis
2025
Anticipation Committee member
Pulse of Science
Tom Ellis is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Co-Director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London. Tom has a degree in Molecular Biology from Oxford University and a PhD from Cambridge University. After university Tom worked in a biotech company in London, then spent 2 years as a postdoc at Boston University before starting his own research group in 2010 at Imperial College London. His group work on synthetic biology with their research treating DNA as the programming language for life. By editing and rewriting the DNA programs in cells his team direct cells to do new tasks useful for modern biotechnology. The Ellis Lab specialises in developing synthetic biology and genome engineering tools for yeasts and diverse bacteria and they apply these tools in projects to make synthetic cells and recoded organisms that can make and release therapeutic molecules, sense and respond as living sensors and can autonomously grow new functional materials. Over the last 15 years the group has published over 100 papers and patents on synthetic biology, trained dozens of PhD students and postdocs and helped initiate several start-up companies.
