Dainan Mao PhD

Dainan Mao, Ph.D., is an associate director with expertise in chemical biology, microbiology, and bioprocess development. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Princeton University, where her research focused on uncovering and activating silent biosynthetic gene clusters in bacteria—an area with significant implications for natural product discovery and drug development.

During her graduate work, Mao contributed to multiple high-impact studies investigating the regulation of bacterial secondary metabolism, including the use of genetic and multi-omics approaches to identify and activate previously unexpressed pathways for novel bioactive compounds. Following her Ph.D., she held a postdoctoral role in biologics and upstream process development at Merck, where she applied transcriptomics and metabolomics to optimize cell culture systems and improve therapeutic production processes.