Victor de Lorenzo

Víctor de Lorenzo (Madrid, 1957) is a Chemist by training and he holds a position of Research Professor in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he currently heads the Laboratory of Environmental Molecular Microbiology at the National Center for Biotechnology. After his PhD at the CSIC Institute of Enzymology (1983), he worked at the Pasteur Institute (1984), the University of California at Berkeley (1985-1987), the University of Geneva (1988) and the Federal Center for Biotechnology in Braunschweig until 1991, the year in which he joined the CSIC in Madrid. He specializes in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of soil bacteria (particularly Pseudomonas putida) as agents for the decontamination of sites damaged by industrial waste. In 2001 this work received the National Award Rey Jaime I for Environmental Protection. In June 2008 he was honored with the GSK International Award of the American Society for Microbiology, and in October of the same year he was granted a Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) and the American Academy of Microbiology, and he has co-chaired with Drew Endy the EC-US Working Group on Synthetic Biology. He has published well over 300 articles in scientific journals and specialized books (https://goo.gl/M4sA5N) and he has served as advisor of numerous international panels. At present, his work explores the interface between Synthetic Biology and Environmental Biotechnology, supported inter alia by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council.