Adam Feist, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Bioengineering
University of California, San Diego
Seminar Information
Microbial systems are central to health, sustainability, and biomanufacturing, yet developing high-performing, scalable strains remains a major challenge. Our lab has created an automated, high-throughput experimentation platform that integrates continuous cultivation, data capture, real-time analysis, and process control to enable evolutionary engineering of microbes through adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE). ALE uses growth selection under defined pressures to generate robust strains for both industrial and biomedical applications, and its strain-agnostic nature makes it broadly applicable. It can also be paired with whole-genome sequencing to identify beneficial mutations. This capability allows us to probe fundamental biology—such as evolutionary constraints and genotype–phenotype relationships—while addressing the urgent need for sustainable bioprocesses to power the circular bioeconomy. In this seminar, I will present the platform’s capabilities, highlight industrial applications, and discuss future directions, including integration with AI for self-driving experimentation and the ability to control mutations through molecular biology tools and population diversity strategies. I will also explore opportunities for collaboration and training across the bioengineering community.
Dr. Feist received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where he also earned his M.S. in 2005. He completed his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2003. Dr. Feist has held research scientist positions at UC San Diego and the Technical University of Denmark’s Center for Biosustainability. In these roles, he led interdisciplinary efforts in laboratory automation, evolutionary engineering, and genome-scale modeling of microbial systems, resulting in numerous peer-reviewed publications and patents. His research has advanced microbial strain engineering and the understanding of emergent microbial properties, with applications across industrial biotechnology and biomedicine. His research excellence has been recognized with the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award and inclusion among the world’s most cited researchers by PLOS Biology. As a faculty member at UC San Diego, his research will focus on automation- and data-driven microbial engineering, the development of scalable solutions for biomanufacturing, and the application of microbial systems to biomedical challenges. He will contribute to the department’s teaching mission through undergraduate and graduate instruction in systems biology, genetic engineering, automation and data acquisition technologies, and core bioengineering principles, while mentoring the next generation of interdisciplinary bioengineers.