Julius B. Lucks is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Co-Director of
the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University. Lucks received his PhD in
chemical physics from Harvard University as a Hertz Fellow, and transitioned to
synthetic biology as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley.
He is a leader in RNA research and
synthetic biology, focusing on developing technologies that tackle global challenges,
most recently in the area of global water insecurity. Professor Lucks has been
recognized with a number of awards including a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award,
an NIH New Innovator Award, an NSF CAREER award, the ACS Synthetic Biology
Young Investigator Award, a Camille-Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, a finalist for the
Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, named to the college of fellows in the American
Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineers, and most recently awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in biology.
He also leads the first NSF graduate training
program in synthetic biology, is a founding member of the Engineering Biology
Research Consortium, and co-founded the Cold Spring Harbor Synthetic Biology
Summer Course. He is a co-founder of Stemloop, Inc. which aims to use cell free
biosensing technology to empower people with information about the health of
themselves and their environment.
