Nils is a Staff Scientist at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, California. As member of the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES) he focuses on engineering gas-fermenting microbes towards production of aromatic polyesters as sustainable alternative to petrochemistry-derived plastics. Before joining Stanford, Nils was task lead of Synthetic Biology with Universities Space Research Association as an Associate Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. He received his PhD from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in Metabolic Engineering working at the Advanced Water Management Centre. Nils holds an engineer’s degree (Dipl. Ing.) in Biochemical Engineering, from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.