Biosketch

Prof. Roel Bovenberg is Corporate Science Fellow Biological Sciences at DSM, an International Life and Materials Sciences company (www.dsm.com) with more than 25 years of industrial experience. He studied chemistry (cum laude) at the University of Leiden with a focus on biochemistry and genetics followed by a PhD at the University of Utrecht on molecular biology of human gene expression. After his PhD in 1988, he joined the industrial biotech company Gist-brocades (Delft, since 1998 part of DSM) and started to research the genetic- and metabolic pathway engineering of filamentous fungi for the production of antibiotics. Currently, he is responsible for the scientific capabilities of DSM in Industrial biotechnology. He has a special interest and expertise in development of microbial cell factories for the sustainable production of natural products and biochemicals.

Bovenberg is co-author of >50 peer reviewed scientific papers and >50 patent applications. Since 2006, he is also an honorary (visiting) professor in Synthetic Biology and Cell engineering at GBB, University of Groningen. He has served on several Science or Industrial advisory boards of Public Private Partnerships in the Netherlands (Kluyver Center of Genomics for Industrial Fermentations, BE-Basic on Bio-based Economy and Ecology, STW Genbiotics on novel antibiotics), the EU (several programs on molecular and synthetic biology of filamentous fungi), USA (SynBerc, Synthetic Biology engineering research center; EBRC, Engineering Biology Research Consortium) and Singapore (SynCTI initiative on Synthetic Biology).

Three top publications 2010-2016

       1.        Medema M.H., Breitling R., Bovenberg R.A.L., Takano E. (2011) Exploiting plug-and-play synthetic biology for drug discovery and production in microorganisms. Nature Reviews Microbiology 9(2): 131-137.

       2.        Ali H., Ries M.I., Lankhorst P.P., van der Hoeven R.A.M., Schouten O.L., Noga M., Hankemeier T., van Peij N.N.M.E., Bovenberg R.A.L., Vreeken R.J. and Driessen A.J.M. (2014) A non-canonical NRPS is involved in the synthesis of fungisporin and related hydrophobic cyclic tetrapeptides in Penicillium chrysogenum. PLoS ONE 9(6): e98212

       3.        Pohl C., Kiel J.A.K.W., Driessen A.J.M., Bovenberg R.A.L. and Nygård Y. (2016) CRISPR/Cas9 Based Genome Editing of Penicillium chrysogenum. ACS Synthetic Biology 5(7): 754-764.