The Climate Biotech Podcast

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a Focused Research Organization (FRO) that accelerates the engineering of non-model organisms.  Henry came to biotechnology through electrical engineering, after a chance opportunity to dissect crayfish neurons inspired a passion for using engineering to understand biology while using biology to enginee...

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Kiara Reyes Gamas, environmental synthetic biologist and non-resident postdoctoral scholar at Rice University's Baker Institute. Alongside her bench science, she has consistently engaged with the social and governance dimensions of synthetic biology, which shapes how she thinks about engineering microbes for environmen...

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul is joined by Eli Hornstein, founder and CEO of Elysia Bio, a company engineering feed crops to address methane emissions from livestock. Eli came to plant biotech through an unlikely path: undergraduate degrees in ecology and linguistics, conservation fieldwork across East Africa and South America, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Mongolia before a...

In Dan Goodwin’s final episode as host, The Climate Biotech Podcast reflects on over 30 episodes of conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, and builders at the frontier of climate biotechnology, and marks the official handover of the podcast to Homeworld Collective's new Executive Director and co-founder, Paul Reginato. Dan and Paul trace their partnership back to MIT, where they were b...

On the most recent episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Ginger Krieg Dosier, an architect-turned-biotech entrepreneur who created biocement at Biomason and is now building BIOME Consortia to accelerate biology's transition from thousands to billions of applications. Ginger's journey from NASA kid in Alabama to founding one of climate biotech's earliest companies...

In this special episode, we sit down with Shuguang Zhang, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Architecture in the MIT Media Lab and a mentor to countless biotech explorers. His personal story has at least one literal "1 in 100 Million" moment and demonstrates the power of curiosity, kindness, and always asking questions. We trace how Shuguang's stubbornness to pursue questions long...

Biomanufacturing doesn’t fail for lack of clever biology; it stalls at the factory gate. We sit down with Biosphere CEO Brian Heligman to unpack how a materials scientist’s journey through batteries and perovskites led to a bold thesis for the bioeconomy: change the constraints of the bioreactor and you change everything downstream. Instead of miles of steam lines and fragile commissioning, Biosph...

Pollution isn’t an abstract headline; it’s inside our bodies today. We sit down with Dr. Jenna Hua to reveal how small, everyday choices expose us to hormone-disrupting chemicals. Jenna explains why single-chemical research fails in a world of mixed exposures and shows how metabolomics turns invisible toxins into clear, personal insights you can act on now. We trace Jenna’s path from nutrition res...

Professor Pam Silver from Harvard Medical School joins us as a founding figure and legend in synthetic biology whose scientific path led from pioneering work on nuclear localization to co-developing the revolutionary "bionic leaf"—a system that combines artificial catalysts with bacteria to convert sunlight and CO2 into fuels and compounds at efficiencies far exceeding natural photosynth...

Sonja Salmon takes us on a fascinating journey through her 20-year quest to harness the power of enzymes and textiles to fight climate change. Her background in textile chemistry led to a deep understanding of natural polymers like cellulose and chitosan, which eventually connected to her fascination with enzymes during a 22-year career at the world's largest industrial enzyme company. The he...

When Loren Looger walks into a room, he doesn't want recognition, he wants to make things that work. The creator of revolutionary, open-source tools that transformed how we visualize brain activity is increasingly turning his protein engineering expertise to formidable challenges in climate, including methane degradation. . Methane sits at the heart of our climate crisis as a greenhouse gas 8...

What happens when a structural biochemist turns his attention to mountains of rock? Dr. Sasha Milshteyn takes us on a remarkable journey from studying tiny molecular movements in proteins to revolutionizing how we extract copper from massive mine heaps. The mining industry faces a critical challenge - we've depleted most easily-processed oxide copper ores, leaving behind harder-to-extract sul...

Mining has essentially been the same for 5,000 years, just now with bigger shovels. Imagine if we could drastically increase mining efficiency and output for both the environment and national security. That's exactly what Dr. Esteban Gazel, a Costa Rican-born geochemist, and Dr. Buz Barstow, a physicist-turned-synthetic biologist, are working on at Cornell University. When these brilliant min...

What if we could reinvent photosynthesis itself? GigaCrop founder and CEO Chris Eiben has a mission to dramatically increase crop yields by redesigning one of biology's most fundamental processes. With half of Earth's habitable land already dedicated to agriculture and growing demands for food, fiber, and materials, we face a critical choice: convert more natural landscapes to farmland o...

The solution to plastic waste looks different depending on where you stand in the world. While Northern Hemisphere biotech approaches to plastic recycling focus on high-temperature enzymes designed to regenerate plastic monomers (which works when you produce lots of plastic), Cesar's lab has engineered a completely different solution. Starting with microorganisms from Antarctica, his team use...

What if we could secure critical supply chains through bioengineering? What if the vaccines protecting millions worldwide didn't require harvesting 10,000 trees annually from Chilean mountains? Maria Astolfi is tackling this exact challenge through groundbreaking work with P450 enzymes. Growing up surrounded by biodiversity shaped Maria's unique perspective on biotechnology. After co-fou...

The global food system has a phosphorus problem that few people talk about. Unlike nitrogen, which cycles naturally through our atmosphere, phosphorus is mined from finite deposits and has no natural cycle. A massive 100-kilometer conveyor belt—visible from space—transports phosphate-rich rock from the Sahara Desert to ships waiting to distribute this critical resource worldwide. Any disruption to...

Imagine proteins engineered to seek out and bind toxic heavy metals, cleaning up contaminated sites and potentially treating metal poisoning in humans.  In this episode, Duke University professor and entrepreneur Pranam Chatterjee shares how his has developed two impressive AI tools transforming this field: MetaLATTE, which predicts whether proteins will bind specific metals, and the upcoming Meta...

Cryptocurrency and climate biotechnology might seem like an unusual pairing, but Albert Anis, founding steward of ValleyDAO, is showing this combination has remarkable potential. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are creating entirely new funding mechanisms for scientists working on our planet's most critical challenges. At the heart of ValleyDAO's approach is a radical rethi...

What if we could harness nature's most precise chemical tools and make them work in industrial settings? James Weltz, co-founder and CSO of Cascade Bio, reveals how enzyme immobilization technology is transforming chemical manufacturing by stabilizing delicate biological catalysts. From his childhood exploring chemical plants with his industrial hygienist father to his groundbreaking PhD rese...

What happens when brilliant scientific innovation meets masterful storytelling?  Marketing rarely tops the priority list for scientists and biotech founders who are deep in the technical challenges of making their innovations work. Yet without effective communication, even groundbreaking discoveries risk languishing in obscurity, unable to attract the talent, funding, and partnerships necessary to...

In our latest episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast, we explore where science meets business with Jesse Lou, the CEO of Conductor Labs.  Jesse shares his unique insights into the indispensable role of Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) in guiding the commercialization of climate technologies. We then explore a particular use case — biomining — with  Jayme Feyhl-Buska of Homeworld Collective. As innov...

How can biotechnology revolutionize heavy industries and convert carbon waste into a valuable resource? In this special cross-posted episode—from our friends Erum and Karl at the Grow Everything Biotech Podcast and Messaginglab—we feature Moji Karimi, co-founder of Cemvita, a company leading the way in carbon conversion technology. Moji shares Cemvita’s journey from a bold vision in industrial bio...

(Recorded July 2024) In this episode, Paul Reginato—co-founder of Homeworld Collective—turns the mic on Dan Goodwin, Homeworld’s co-founder and Executive Director, to explore his journey from near-failures in Boise, Idaho, to becoming a trailblazer in climate biotechnology. Dan reflects on how his formative years at Harvey Mudd College and his time at Stanford under AI visionary Fei-Fei Li, couple...

Join us as we explore the innovative world of protein engineering with Samuel Thompson. Samuel's work focuses on engineering proteins to function in organic solvents, environments that would be hostile to traditional cell-based life. This approach has significant implications for bridging the gap between the enzymes market and the trillion-dollar specialty chemicals market, potentially leadin...