Trevor is the Founder and CEO of Caravel Bio - a platform company building new protein machines. Caravel’s hybrid approach to protein engineering and scale-up combines the best parts of synthetic and cell-free biology. A decade ago, fresh out of his first biochem class, he helped launch Spira, an IndieBio-backed company that worked on producing proteins in algae. Ultimately, he left Spira to finish undergrad and pursue a PhD in Biotechnology Engineering at Tufts University. His PhD thesis focused on creating tools for engineering bacterial spores as self-assembling, evolvable protein carriers to complement or replace materials science immobilization of proteins. Caravel continues to leverage spores and cell-free systems in new forms of high-throughput, contextual protein evolution for products across health and industrial biology.