Tom Ellis is leading a research team in synthetic genome engineering and synthetic biology in the Department of Bioengineering. He has track record in synthetic biology, being author of over 50 publications in synthetic biology including work in Cell, Nature Methods, Nature Biotechnology, PNAS and Nature Reviews. He is leader of the UK-funded project to build a synthetic yeast chromosome for the international synthetic yeast project (Sc2.0). He co-leads the teaching of Imperial’s synthetic biology undergraduate module and has won multiple awards for teaching and for supervision of iGEM teams. His research focuses on developing the foundational tools for accelerating, automating and scaling design-led synthetic genomics and synthetic biology, focusing on research projects in yeast (S. cerevisiae) as well as applied projects in other industrially-relevant and medically-relevant microbes.