Email:Leo.Rios@ed.ac.uk

Leonardo Rios earned his  Chemical Engineering MEng and  Biotechnology MSc degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Mexican Institute of Petroleum.

This led him to pursue his PhD in the Biochemical Engineering Department at UCL under supervision of Professor Gary J. Lye where he worked in microscale automated tools to design, model and optimise de novo pathways, specifically working with transaminases, transketolases and mono amino oxidases.

Leonardo then won a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the University of California Berkeley to perform research study at the Keasling Lab in the Joint BioEnergy Institute in the microbial synthetic biology field

Leonardo was awarded a lectureship in 2017 at the Engineering School of the University of Edinburgh where he leads his research group at the Institute for Bioengineering

His research focuses on combining the areas of Biochemical Engineering and Synthetic Biology. He is applying synthetic biology tools to engineer microbial cell factories to produce high-value products like biofuels, biomaterials and pharmaceuticals. He is also developing novel continuous-flow bioreactors to host the engineered cells, as well as engineering the microbial cell factories to be suitable for continuous flow bioprocesses.

He is also very interested in developing new cheaper bioprocesses for biologics production, which could be applied in countries from Latin-American where he co-founded the startup Artes Genomicas SA de CV, which is looking to enable wider access of expensive biologics to the underprivileged sector while promoting local production.

Leonardo is also the co-founder of Marizca LTD and Logikopt SA de CV.