Mark Blenner

Affiliation

University of Delaware

Track

Biography

Dr. Blenner is the Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Career Development Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. Prior to that, he was the McQueen Quattlebaum Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson University. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University in 2009 and completed three years of postdoctoral training as an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow and an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. He has won numerous awards including the 2022 AIChE Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering Division Early Career Award, the 2022 Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award, the 2021 ACS BIOT Young Investigator Award, and the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His research is broadly focused on engineering biomolecular and cellular systems to produce fuels, chemicals, enzymes, biopharmaceuticals and biosensors. Some of the common threads across his lab’s work are around using microbes for enabling a circular economy and addressing biomanufacturing-related problems arising from cell line design in both microbes and animal cells.