User:Rej5y7/Jonathan Meuser Sandbox

Jonathan Eugene Meuser (born 1980) is an American scientist, artist, and entrepreneur. His scientific work has focused on plant and algae biology. His artistic works have incorporated many aspects of his research and have been displayed at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Meuser has also been involved with the biotech industry working at Synthetic Genomics and Algenol, and founding two biotech startups. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Chi Botanic, a plant cellular agriculture company.

Education
Meuser completed his Ph.D. in 2011 in Environmental Science and Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in the laboratory of Matthew Posewitz. Meuser has been affiliated with the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is a member of the The Society for In Vitro Biology.

Scientific contributions
Throughout his career, Meuser's research interests have focused on understanding the biology of plants and algae. As an undergraduate at UC Davis, Meuser worked in the laboartory of John Harada on a transcription factor that controls embryogenesis in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. During his graduate work, Meuser focused on understanding biohydrogen production in algae. Meuser was the first to isolate the double hydrogenase knock-out mutant in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This strain has allowed for a greater understanding of how hydrogenase works in algae and has been used as a background strain for biotechnological approaches for increasing biohydrogen production. Meuser's other scientific acheivments include contributions to the genome sequencing effort of Cyanophora paradoxa, understading microbial comunity diversity in the Great Salt Lake, and development of a backyard algae-based hydrogen reactor.

Artistic works
Meuser has been associated with the artist collective Futurefarmers. One of their projects, Lunchbox Laboratory (2007), was a concept design of a lunch box sized laboratory that could be distributed to schools to allow students to screen strains of algae for hydrogen production. The work was exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2008, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009, and featured in ARTnews and Make:.

Biotech and entrepreneurship
After graduate school, Meuser joined Synthetic Genomics to work on the SGI-Exon algae project. His work focused on improving photosynthesis in the oil producing alga Nannochloropsis which resulted in the discovery of genes that regulate high light acclimation, for which he was awarded several patents. In 2015, he moved to Algenol to work on photosynthesis in cyanobacteria to increase ethanol production.

Meuser has also founded two companies in the biotech space: ALGI Instruments, a company that produces a Clark electrode based system for simultaneously measuring hydrogen and oxygen production from an algae cultures ; and Chi Botanic, a plant cellular agriculture company. Chi Botanic has been described as a "Synbio 3.0" company and is focusing on producing high-value plant products with plant suspension cell cultures.

Potential links to add:

http://www.futurefarmers.com/lunchboxlab/

(IV). Grants and Scholarships

NASA GSRP Fellowship 2005 – 2008

Wilfred William Robbins Memorial Scholarship 2003

UC Davis Gold Community Service Award 2003

Dept. of Energy Summer Undergrad Research Fellowship (SURF) 2003, 2004 Gail

and Ruth Oliver Scholarship - UC Davis 2002

Jack Messick Memorial Scholarship - UC Davis 2002

Howard Hughes Medical Fellowship - UC Davis 2001

(IV). Awards

Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Scholar CSM 2010

Arthur Sacks Sustainability Award - CSM 2007

Sussman Award – CSM 2005

UC Davis Plant Biology Departmental Citation 2004

UC Davis Outstanding Senior Award 2004

patent review: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3805483