1:04 p.m., March 24, 2010----Gregory Stephanopoulos, W.H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the Robert L. Pigford Memorial Lecture at 10 a.m., Friday, April 9, in Room 102 Colburn Laboratory.

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Stephanopoulos will speak on the topic “Biofuels and Metabolic Engineering.” The lecture is sponsored by the University of Delaware Department of Chemical Engineering.

Stephanopoulos plans to review the current landscape of alternative fuels from renewable resources along with the foundations of metabolic engineering, its main technologies and how it has evolved in its short life span.

New concepts of importance in the post-genomic era will be presented that allow the engineering of cells to elicit multigenic properties, a task difficult to achieve following the usual single gene paradigm, he said.

Reaction engineering principles will be invoked to identify rate-limiting steps and illustrate many-fold throughput enhancements that make microbes serious contenders for numerous applications.

These ideas will be illustrated with examples from the production of chemical products and biofuels from renewable resources, he said.

Stephanopoulos received a bachelor of science degree at the National Technical University of Athens, a master's degree at the University of Florida and a doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota, all in chemical engineering.

He taught at the California Institute of Technology from 1978-85 before being appointed professor at MIT.

Stephanopoulos served as associate director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (1990-97) and is also the Taplin Professor of Health Sciences and Techology, instructor of bioengineering at Harvard Medical School, and the W. H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

His current research focuses on metabolic engineering. He has co-authored or co-edited five books, more than 320 papers, and 25 patents and supervised more than 110 graduate and postdoctoral students. He is the editor-in-chief of Metabolic Engineering and serves on the editorial boards of seven scientific journals and the advisory boards of five academic departments. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It honors Robert Pigford, a founder of the Department of Chemical Engineering whose vision and leadership in the field made long-lasting contributions to the department.