Henry H. Lee, PhD is CEO & co-founder of Cultivarium, a non-profit applied research lab building the scientific tools and infrastructure to study and engineer the living world for applications spanning nutrition, materials, and medicines. With support from organizations such as Schmidt Futures and the Wellcome Trust, Cultivarium has accelerated the engineering of new-to-lab microbes by more than 100-fold, working with over 500 organisms ranging from alkaliphiles that form biocement to filamentous fungi that can grow habitats for off-world living.

He is interested in engineering approaches for understanding biology across the tree of life: bacteria, archaea, fungi, and higher eukaryotes. He has a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University with James J. Collins. As a postdoctoral fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School with George Church, he domesticated the ultrafast-growing bacterium Vibrio natriegens and pioneered enzymatic DNA-synthesis methods now enabling DNA data storage. He has co-founded three startups, authored eleven issued or pending patents, and co-chairs the Department of War BioMADE subcommittee on Strain and Strain Engineering. His current focus is an engineering biology platform that leverages software and hardware to domesticate the entire biosphere, turning it into reusable infrastructure for beneficial biotechnologies.