Awarded in 2015
Home Department: Bioengineering
Faculty Advisors: Elizabeth Sattely (Chemical Engineering), Drew Endy (Bioengineering), Sharon Long (Biology), and KC Huang (Bioengineering)

Research Title: Engineering ammonia production in free-living diazotrophs for plant fertilization

Research Description: Tim's undergraduate research focused on producing hydrogen as a renewable fuel directly from sunlight. He is looking forward to broadening problem solving and creative thinking skills so that he can tackle bigger challenges in the years ahead and will be doing quarterly rotations in different laboratories during his first year to define his research interests.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Tim is the founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, a startup that raised $4.3M in pre-seed funding earlier this year to research and develop sustainable fertilizer, a National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge. Switch is working on a synbio-driven approach, first developed at Stanford, to reprogram microbes with controlled release of ammonia.