Isaiah Woodson

I am currently a 5th year PhD candidate in SEMTE (School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy) within the department of chemical engineering. My passion for research in academia has been driven by the dire impacts of global climate change and humanity's desperate necessity for a revolution towards a highly sustainable industrial society. For this reason, I have great enthusiasm to educate current and future generations in higher and primary education, and I strongly desire to pursue a career in academia as a research professor. 

I had the unique and privileged pleasure of joining Dr. David Nielsen's lab, where we focus on developing novel biotechnologies for the efficient conversion of renewable feedstocks into a variety of sustainable fuel and chemical products. My current thesis work primarily focuses on the development, design, and optimization of sustainable fermentation processes that rely on heterotrophic carbon fixation. Through transport modeling and novel reactor design, I investigate efficient methods for delivering carbon dioxide gas to fermentation media. Additionally, I have extensive experience utilizing and incorporating several Escherichia coli strains, previously engineered for efficient and high-yielding production of alcohols and dicarboxylic acids, within our designed reactors. I also heavily focus on utilizing metabolic engineering and synthetic biology techniques to engineer microorganisms, specifically E. coli, for enhanced heterotrophic carbon fixation, primarily by the integration of synthetic carbon fixing pathways.

Thank you for reading my bio, and feel free to email me if you have any questions!