Eleftherios (Terry) Papoutsakis

Since 2007, E. Terry Papoutsakis is Eugene DuPont Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. He received his undergraduate education at the Nat. Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece, and his MS & PhD from Purdue University. He started his academic career at Rice University before moving to Northwestern University where he was appointed as Walter P. Murphy Professor. His group has made important contributions in the areas of clostridia genetics and metabolic engineering; animal-cell biotechnology; & stem-cell bioengineering. He is widely recognized as a leader in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology of industrial clostridia. His lab is interested in developing strains of industrial importance in the biorenewables arena. His group was one of the first to recognize the importance of and study the fundamental mechanisms, both fluid-mechanical and biological, underlying cell injury and death due to mixing and aeration in animal-cell bioreactors. He pioneered several bioprocessing issues in stem-cell biotechnologies. Most recently, he is working on developing cell and gene-therapy technologies based on extracellular vesicles, and separately on biotechnologies to convert natural gas to liquid fuel. He has trained 66 PhD, 27 MS, & 32 postdoctoral students. His research has been funded by $35+ millions of federal grants. He has published over 250 papers (receiving 15500 citations with a 73 h-factor), and has 17+ issued or pending patents.