SIMB 2022 Annual Meeting Welcome Letter

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to join us in the San Francisco, California. on August 07-10, 2022 for our Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. The program committee and myself are especially excited about this year’s meeting as we optimistically look forward to an in person meeting with old friends and colleagues.

The kick-off to our meeting on Sunday afternoon includes a keynote address from Dr. Jay Keasling, the CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley. The keynote will be immediately followed by the Science Slam session that features “rapid-fire” style presentations from students, postdocs, and young investigators.

Our technical program once again builds from the five SIMB focus areas of Biocatalysis, Environmental Microbiology, Fermentation & Cell Culture, Natural Products, and Metabolic Engineering. The program committee has been very active in establishing a robust, cutting-edge scientific program around these areas to highlight both recent industrial successes and emerging research advances in our field. As this meeting will take place in the U.S. capital, we have planned for three timely special sessions: “Animal Products from Fermentation & Synthetic Biology”, “Decreasing the Time and Capitol for a DBTL Cycle”, and “Microbial (and Cell Free) Engineering of Protein Secretion”. Finally, we continue our tradition of hosting a student session and a diversity session. In addition to the technical program, we will continue the poster sessions, annual banquet, and 5K run, which are traditional highlights of the conference.

This year’s annual meeting promises to be an excellent opportunity for networking and scientific dialogue. I encourage you to participate by both contributing through oral and poster presentation abstracts as well as attending this great meeting. We strongly encourage student and young investigators to participate in poster, and student oral presentation sessions.

I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in August!

Mark Blenner
Associate Professor
University of Delaware