Christopher Dundas, PhD '20

Chris Dundas is a 2015 Bachelors of Science UB CBE gradute who went on to earn his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. As of 2024, he has been appointed as an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia in the Department of Plant Biology and Institute of Bioinformatics. Here, his research group is interested in understanding how plants exchange carbon with their microbiomes and the environemt. They are using plant and microbial synthetic biology with the aim to rewire carbon fluxes and understand how plants grow in diverse ecosystems, optimize the activities of beneficial plant-colonizing microbes and engineer crops for food and bioenergy production.

During his time at UB, he participated in undergraduate research with Associate Professor Sheldon Park. He helped to redesign a small molecule-binding protein to improve its functionality in cell biology and bioseparation technologies. Dundas speaks highly of his time at UB, particularly the annual Ruckenstein Lectures, and says they were a "fantastic venue to learn about cutting-edge research directly from the rockstars of chemical and biological engineering," especially when he was able to meet Professor Bob Langer from MIT.