Dr Leonardo Rios Solis

Dr Leonardo Rios Solis

Lecturer
University of Edinburgh

Dr Leonardo Rios earned his Chemical engineering and MSc degree at the Mexican National Autonomous University and the Mexican Institute of Petroleum. He then performed a PhD in the Biochemical Engineering Department at UCL where he worked in microscale automated tools to optimize and model synthetic de novo pathways, specifically working with transaminases, transketolases and mono amino oxidases.
Leonardo then won a prestigious fellowship from the University of California Berkeley to perform postdoctoral studies at the Keasling lab in the Joint BioEnergy Institute. His research focused on applying synthetic biology tools to engineer yeast and E. coli strains using multiplex CRISPR Cas9 to produce biofuels and pharmaceuticals.
Dr Leonardo Rios was awarded a lectureship at the Engineering School of the University of Edinburgh in 2017, where he leads his research the group at the Institute for Bioengineering and the Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology. His research motivation focuses on promoting further understanding on the interface of Biochemical Engineering and Synthetic Biology as well as to find novel ways to apply this knowledge to tackle the growing socio-economic inequalities. In more details, Dr Rios’s research group focuses on applying synthetic biology tools to engineer microbial cell factories to produce high-value products such as biofuels, biomaterials and pharmaceuticals
Dr Rios’s group strongly believes that boosting the production and maximising the potential of their microbial cell factories requires the parallel development of novel bioprocesses to cater to the new qualities of the engineered cells. Dr Rios is also interested in entrepreneurial activities, co-founding startups Marizca LTD and Logykopt.

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