Overview

Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro is a Reader at the Department of Bioengineering, Director of the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and Director of the Microbial Food Hub at Imperial College London. He is leading a research group at the interface of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.
Rodrigo has published more than 200 articles and patents in the field of sustainable bioproduction.

Biography

Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro obtained his PhD at the University of Salamanca (Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Jose Luis Revuelta. His PhD thesis was about systems metabolic engineering of Ashbya gossypii for the production of food ingredients (vitamins, flavour enhancers and lipids). During his PhD, Rodrigo was a visiting researcher at Prof. Jens Nielsen´s group at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), at Prof. Jean-Marc Nicaud’s lab at INRA (France) and at Prof. Kamisaka’s group at AIST (Japan). Before that, Rodrigo obtained an MSc in Microbial Biotechnology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and two undergraduate degrees (Biotechnology and Chemical Engineering) at the University of Salamanca.
After his PhD, Rodrigo moved to France with a Marie Curie Fellowship where he performed his postdoc in the group of Jean-Marc Nicaud. During his postdoctoral his research focused on engineering the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to 1. produce different compounds (lipids, lipid-derived chemicals, carotenoids, etc for food and fuels applications), 2. be able to use low-cost carbon sources such as lignocellulosic materials or starch as renewable feedstocks and 3) facilitate the downstream processes via metabolic engineering (e.g. recovery of the products by engineering lipid secretion).
In 2017, he joined Imperial College London as independent research with an Imperial College Research Fellowship and in 2019 he was appointed as lecturer in the Department of Bioengineering. From 2024 he is the Director of the new Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and of the Microbial Food Hub.