The Novozymes Award 2019 goes to James C. Liao. Novozymes honors Professor James C. Liao for his contributions to science that can help develop fuels and chemicals from renewable resources. As the global population grows with an increased pressure on the planet’s resources, Novozymes awards professor James C. Liao, President of Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
”We are awarding James C. Liao for his original and fundamental breakthroughs in microbial synthesis of fuels and chemicals from renewable resources,” says Jens Nielsen, professor at The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability and CEO at BioInnovation Institute in Denmark. “The world still needs new solutions for a sustainable future, and James C. Liaos’ work helps us understand nature better and use biology to do exactly this.”
Dr. Liao is a pioneer in Metabolic and Synthetic Biology, specializing in both the microbial synthesis of fuels and chemicals, and the redesign of primary metabolic network. He also invented Network Component Analysis (NCA) for analyzing transcription regulatory networks, and designed synthetic gene-metabolic regulatory circuits, which set the foundation for Metabolic and Synthetic Biology. Dr. Liao’s achievements have been honored with numerous awards, including the US Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award of EPA and the White House Champion of Change in Renewable Energy. In 2013, he was elected as a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and received the ENI Renewable Energy Prize, bestowed by the President of Italy. In sum, Dr. Liao’s work has demonstrated a perfect integration between life sciences and engineering to address significant problems facing human society today.
The prize has been awarded since 2015 and is given annually in honor of Professor John Villadsen and his contributions to biochemical and chemical engineering at DTU and other universities around the world.
James C. Liao will receive the award at a ceremony where Peder Holk Nielsen, CEO at Novozymes, will hand the prize to the winner. Ceremony will take place December 3, 1 p.m., at Novozymes’ Innovation Campus in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen.