Dr. Nathan Hillson received his Doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard Medical School. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. Nathan is currently the Head of the BioDesign Department at the Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also a Principal Investigator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Agile BioFoundry together with being the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at TeslaGen Biotechnologies Inc. Dr. Hillson has developed experimental wetware, software, and automated laboratory devices. He had recently created PIACE, a highly efficient chromosomal integration method to engineer metabolic pathways in bacteria. Nathan also worked to develop the patented j5 DNA Assembly Software to create scar-less plasmids by combining designed DNA oligos and cloning strategies such as SLIC and Gibson. Dr. Hillson aims to create these automated platforms to standardize microbial engineering, DNA construction, and sequence validation.