Christina Smolke

Christina Smolke is CEO and co-founder of Antheia, Inc. and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Southern California in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 2001.

Dr. Smolke, a pioneer in the fields of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, joined Caltech’s faculty in 2003 as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and joined Stanford’s faculty in 2009. Dr. Smolke’s early work pioneered the design and application of a broad class of RNA molecules, RNA switches, that detect chemical signals and regulate targeted protein activities, providing programmable platforms for building biological sensors and control systems. At Stanford, her team led the breakthrough research to engineer baker’s yeast to produce some of the most complex and valuable plant-based essential medicines known to humankind. At Antheia, her vision and leadership has enabled a synthetic biology platform that dramatically expands the diversity and complexity of molecules that can be reconstructed, enabling new possibilities for drug discovery as well as efficient, sustainable, localized, on-demand drug manufacturing at scale.

Dr. Smolke’s impact in advancing the frontiers of biotechnology has been recognized with numerous awards, including Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, Nature’s 10, AIMBE College of Fellows, NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, NSF Career Award, Novozymes Award for Excellence in Biochemical Engineering, WTN Award in Biotechnology, and TR35 Award.