Biography
Jason is Founding Director of the Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford, a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford Department of Chemistry and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is also founder and CSO of Constructive Biology Ltd, which develops and applies his foundational advances in engineering biology and synthetic biology, and a Non-Executive Director at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.
Prior to the launch of GBI, Jason was a Programme Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), where he was also Founder and Head of the Centre for Chemical & Synthetic Biology (CCSB) and joint Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry. He was also a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry, and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Jason was awarded the Francis Crick Prize by the Royal Society in 2009 and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Corday Morgan Prize and the European Molecular Biology Organization’s (EMBO) Gold Medal, in 2010. He is the inaugural recipient (2011) of the Louis-Jeantet Young Investigator Career Award and in 2019 he was awarded the Sackler International Prize in the Physical Sciences. Jason is in the European Patent Office Inventor Hall of Fame, a member of EMBO, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from ETH, Zurich in 2024. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Fellow of The Royal Society.
Topic
“Reprograming the genetic code to unlock the potential of recombinant strategy for peptide manufacturing”