Hector Garcia Martin

Hector Garcia Martin was born in Bilbao, part of the Basque region in Spain. Hector studied physics and specialized in solid state physics at the University of the Basque Country. He obtained his Ph. D in condensed matter physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied Bose Einstein Condensates and scaling laws in ecology. His interest in using theoretical physics tools to make biology predictable led him to join the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, where he worked on studying microbial communities through metagenomics as a postdoctoral fellow. Pursuing the opportunity to improve predictive models in biology through synthetic biology, he became a group lead at Berkeley Lab in 2007, where he is part of the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Agile BioFoundry programs. In his current role, he combines machine learning, mechanistic models, automation, microfluidics and genetic editing techniques to effectively guide the metabolic engineering process and provide some of the first examples in predictive synthetic biology.