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As Director of Strain Development at Nucelis, Dr. Fong oversees all the ASAPâ„¢ (Accelerated Strain Advancement Platform) partner projects. In addition to leading her project teams on existing projects, she works closely with business development and research to identify new product opportunities and partners.

Noel has been at Nucelis since its founding in 2012, and prior to that, she was a member of the research team at Cibus since 2007. Prior to joining Cibus, Noel was at Zymogenetics/Novo Nordisk (now Bristol-Myers Squibb) in Seattle, where she engineered the production strain for making FXIII clotting factor in S. cerevisiae. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School and Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals (now Pfizer), where she studied insulin signaling pathways and associated yeast applications. Prior to that, she was at Chiron (now Novartis), where she expressed human growth factors in yeast.

She received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and M.S. in Food Science in the Dept. of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis, and her A.B. in Chemistry and Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley.

As an active 30+ year member of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, she was named President in August, 2020, after serving as the Conference Chair for the 2018 General Meeting. In service to her field, she is a reviewer for two publications: Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, and Enzyme and Microbial Technology.