David Nielsen is a Professor of Chemical Engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, Arizona State University. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2001, and his Ph.D. from Queen’s University at Kingston in 2006, then completed his Postdoc at MIT from 2006 to 2009. His research interests include the engineering of microbial biocatalysts and bioprocesses to convert renewable resources into useful fuels and chemicals. His group works at the interface of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.