Hector Garcia Martin is a scientist in Berkeley Lab working on bioengineering cells to produce biofuels and other renewable products for the benefit of society. He started his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics, but very early on became fascinated by emergent properties in biology, like the species–area rule, an almost universal rule for which he found an explanation. Hence, he decided to work on metagenomics for his postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute, obtaining blueprints of microbial community metabolism. Irked by the difficulty of creating predictive models for microbial communities, he focused on a more amenable target: pure cultures for which we have the tools to change their genome. This took him to his current position, developing predictive models for biological systems to produce renewable biofuels and other products. He develops predictive mathematical models of cells at the intersection of machine learning, synthetic biology and automation, as the founder of Berkeley Lab's Quantitative Metabolic Modeling group, and Director for JBEI's Data Science and Modeling at the Biofuels and Bioproducts Division.