Agilent Early Career Professor Award
Category: BioValleyDr. Jewett joined the faculty of Engineering at Northwestern in 2009 where he engineers biological systems for compelling applications in medicine and biotechnology. He made strong contributions to cell-free biology during his Ph.D. work at Stanford, to systems biology at the Technical University of Denmark, and to synthetic biology at Harvard as a post-doctoral researcher before coming to Northwestern.
In James Swartz's lab at Stanford University, Jewett developed a high yielding and cost-effective bacterial cell-free protein synthesis platform that is now being used as a high-throughput protein production platform and for the commercial production of personalized medicines. Although cell-free translation systems had been used for more than 50 years, Jewett demonstrated that central metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, transcription, and translation could be co-activated in a single test tube under conditions conducive to high-level protein synthesis.
In Jens Nielsen’s lab at the Technical University of Denmark, Jewett generated the first datasets in yeast that integrated data across at least three levels of the cellular hierarchy and protein interaction information with metabolic network topology. Jewett and colleagues discovered that genome-scale metabolic models could be used to upgrade the information content obtained in systems-level data for bridging the gap between transcriptional state and metabolic flux.
In George Church’s lab at the Harvard Medical School, Jewett constructed ribosomes in vitro as a milestone towards a novel ribosome evolution platform and the construction of synthetic life. In a demonstration elusive for four decades, he showed that Escherichia coli ribosomes could be reconstituted in a one-step incubation procedure under chemical conditions that mimic the cytoplasm. Jewett also discovered that ribosomal RNA synthesis could be combined with ribosome self-assembly to make functionally active ribosomes. This advance promises to accelerate the development of synthetic ribosomes capable of producing and evolving non-natural peptide drugs and hybrid materials.
Jewett received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1999 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his M.S. in 2001 and his Ph.D. in 2005 Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.