Senior Research Associate, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge

Dr Jenny Molloy is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a Group Leader at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), where she develops open source technologies for engineering biology and biomanufacturing. Prior to this she was the Programme Coordinator of the University of Cambridge Strategic Research Initiative in Synthetic Biology and the OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Center. She has a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford focused on genetic control of dengue mosquitoes.

Jenny’s research is centered around local, distributed biomanufacturing of enzymes to enhance global capacity for biological research and advance applications in health and sustainability. Ongoing projects include developing open source DNA toolkits for recombinant protein expression using synthetic biology-based platform technologies, high-quality protein purification in low-resource contexts, open source microbial strain engineering, CRISPR-based molecular diagnostics for infectious diseases and enzyme-based carbon capture and upcycling.

Jenny is a former Fellow of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology, a member of the OECD Global Forum on Technology Synthetic Biology Expert Group and since 2015 she has co-founded four social enterprises and nonprofits making open source tools more accessible to researchers and building communities for open source tool developers. She currently sits on the board of the US non-profit Open Science Hardware Foundation, the UK non-profit Beneficial Bio and the Kenyan NGO ISAAA Africenter.