Thomas Gorochowski is a Professor of Biological Engineering and Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK. His lab aims to better understand the computational architecture of living systems to enable their effective reprogramming as a basis for applications spanning adaptive living materials to cellular computers.

Prior to joining the University of Bristol, he was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at DSM where he worked on large-scale automated strain development for precision gene expression in bacteria. He then joined the Synthetic Biology Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA where he developed the initial sequencing analysis pipeline that forms part of the large-scale efforts at the MIT-Broad Foundry for Synthetic Biology and explored new ways that deep-sequencing could be harnessed for bioengineering. This led to the creation of the first sequencing-based ‘genetic debugger’ that enables the rapid diagnosis of faults in large circuits and simultaneous characterization of many genetic parts in situ. In 2016, he was awarded a BrisSynBio Fellowship to set up his own lab at the University of Bristol, and in 2017 received a prestigious 5-year Royal Society University Fellowship.

Since returning to Bristol, he has rapidly established a group pioneering the use of advanced genetic design approaches and novel sequencing methods to aid the engineering of biological systems across scales. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and he provides leadership as Co-Director of the University of Bristol’s BioDesign Specialist Research Institute and as a Core Member of the UKRI-BBSRC ‘Transformative Technologies Strategy Advisory Panel’. He has also lead innovative public engagement activities such as the ‘Become a Biological Engineer’ to bring bioengineering into the classroom.