Affiliation: University of Edinburgh, Institute of Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry, and Biotechnology, School of Biological Sciences

Dr. Nadanai Laohakunakorn, originally from Bangkok, obtained his BA/MSci in Natural Sciences (Physics) from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2010. He remained in Cambridge to carry out his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ulrich Keyser, where he studied nanopores and single-molecule biophysics. After defending his thesis in 2015, he moved to Lausanne where he worked with Prof. Sebastian Maerkl at EPFL on cell-free synthetic biology. His work there focused on combining microfluidic devices with cell-free gene expression systems for high-throughput and rapid prototyping of genetic parts and circuits. In 2019 he received a Chancellor's Fellowship in Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, where he has established a lab for quantitative engineering of cell-free systems. His current research interests include coupling synthetic metabolism with cell-free protein synthesis, regenerative cell-free systems, and metabolomic analysis and computational approaches for the optimization of cell-free reactions.