Oliver Yu, Co-Founder and CEO of Conagen.
Dr. Yu has a B. Sc. from Dept. of Biophysics at the Fudan University in Shanghai, and a Ph. D. from Department of Biology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. His postdoctoral training was at the DuPont Company in Wilmington, Delaware. He joined the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in 2001, serving as a Principal Investigator until 2012. During that time, he was also an adjunct professor at the Washington University in St Louis and University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Yu has published more than 120 manuscripts and patents in the area of metabolic engineering in plants and synthetic biology in microbes. In 2010, Dr. Yu co-started a biotech company, Conagen Inc, currently located at Boston, Massachusetts. Conagen has more than 180 scientists and engineers in three cities, focusing on pathway engineering and microbial platform development. Conagen has become a fullspectrum service provider for the synthetic biology industry, providing services ranging from novel pathway constructions, scale-up and process engineering, and pilot and large-scale fermentation production. Dr. Yu is currently also an affiliate staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and serves on the editorial board of several academic journals and the review panels.