Turning bacteria into chemical factories
Most academics follow a very traditional path to a job as a professor: earn a PhD, spend a few years as a postdoc, then find a tenure-track job as an assistant professor.Kristala Jones Prather decided to take a detour from that path. After earning her PhD in chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, Prather chose to spend time outside of academia, working at Merck. Four years later, she launched her own lab at MIT, where she designs new ways to engineer bacteria to synthesize useful chemical compounds such as drugs and biofuels.“It was not the easiest way to do it, but it was something I was really interested in doing. And it worked well for me,” says Prather, who is now the Theodore T. Miller Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Kristala Jones Prather Photo: M. Scott Brauer While working in industry, Prather...