John Love PhD

John Love is a Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Exeter, which he joined as a lecturer in 2003. John’s research team is diverse and employs a multidisciplinary combination of technologies to investigate a range of questions. Industrial engagement and knowledge transfer is a leitmotif of our research; We have close partnerships with several businesses, from local SMEs to multinational companies. John has held a BBSRC Industry Interchange Partnership with Shell where he led the photosynthetic microbial biofuels research program. He won the Industry Outstanding Impact in Science and Technology R&D Award for his research into innovative optics for flat-panel photobioreactors and the European Biophysics Award at the Società Italiana di Fisica International School of Physics for a paper entitled “Perfluorodecalin as an In-VivoMounting Medium”. In 2013, he won the Exeter Impact Award for Outstanding Impact in Technology and was a finalist in the 2014 BBSRC Innovator of the Year Award for the production of retail-grade diesel in bacteria.

Since 2012 John’s laboratory has hosted the Exeter University iGEM team, going from Bronze to silver to four gold medals; in 2017, the team also won Best Environmental Project and Best Applied Design for a Synthetic Biology solution to remediate pollution from the legacy of mining in the South West.