Dr. Arkin is Director of the Synthetic Biology Institute and of the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Bioengineering. He is also co-director of the Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, director of bioinformatics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, and co-director of BIOFAB (International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology). His research centers on uncovering the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and exploiting them for applications in health, the environment, and bioenergy. He was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2007 and, and has been profiled in Time Magazine as a “future innovator”. A member of the University of California at Berkeley faculty since 1999, he earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.