Chemical Engineering Seminar
Professor McDonald is a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California at Davis. She received her B.S. from Stanford University, her M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, all in Chemical Engineering. Professor McDonald’s research is focused on synthetic biology in plants, including the development of novel plant viral expression systems, as well as bioprocess engineering technologies to produce and purify recombinant proteins (including human therapeutic proteins, enzymes for cellulose degradation, and bioscavengers for use as medical countermeasure protection agents biothreats) using whole plants, harvested plant tissues or plant cells grown in bioreactors. She served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering from 2000-2013 and as Faculty Director for the UC Davis ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program, an NSF funded program to improve the recruitment, retention and advancement of women STEM faculty from 2013-2018. From 2006-2013, she was the PI and Director of the National Science Foundation CREATE-IGERT, an interdisciplinary graduate training program with a focus on applications of plant biotechnology to biopharmaceuticals, biorefineries and sustainable agriculture. Prof. McDonald is currently the lead for the Food and Pharmaceutical Synthesis Thrust of a multi-university NASA-funded Center, the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space II (CUBES II) which supports biomanufacturing for deep space exploration, a co-PI on an NSF-funded Growing Convergence Center on enabling technologies for cultivated meat, and the PI of a multi-university NIST/BioMADE RACER project for distributed manufacturing of viral antigens. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and was awarded the 2022 D.I.C. Wang award for Excellence in Biochemical Engineering. Websites: Research Lab: http://mcdonald-nandi.ech.ucdavis.edu CUBES: http://cubes.space Cultivated Meat Consortium: https://cultivatedmeat.ucdavis.edu/ Global Healthshare: http://ghs.ucdavis.edu
Plants are a vast renewable source of important natural products, and the development of genetic engineering techniques has opened up a myriad of new possibilities for extending the biosynthetic capabilities of plants. Although plant biotechnology has been deployed commercially for decades for improved agronomic traits of crops, the combination of new plant expression technologies and synthetic biology components, inexpensive DNA synthesis, and novel bioprocessing strategies are enabling plants and plant cells to be used as molecular foundries. For example, new production platforms based on transient expression in plants within contained manufacturing facilities are showing enormous promise for rapid, scalable, and lower cost production of vaccines and therapeutics. Plants are unique higher eukaryotic production hosts that can be very simply grown using light, water, carbon dioxide, and mineral nutrients, making them ideal for applications in low-resource environments. This presentation will describe some of the challenges encountered when using plants as molecular foundries, as well as our group's research to increase productivity and product quality while minimizing resources, with applications ranging from medical countermeasures for biodefense on Earth to molecular pharming on Mars.