John Cumbers

Founder

Dr John Robert Cumbers is a British molecular biologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SynBioBeta, the organisation and annual Global Synthetic Biology Summit that promotes synthetic biology and its applications for a more sustainable world. He founded the iGEM team at Brown University in 2005 and served as an iGEM ambassador to China in 2006 and 2007, then worked at NASA Ames for seven years from 2008, helping start the agency's programme in synthetic biology and space-resource utilisation. Before SynBioBeta, his first synthetic-biology company, Universal BioMining, did not succeed, prompting him to build the Synthetic Biology Launchpad incubator, through which he saw many promising small companies lacking a supporting ecosystem, an insight that led him to found SynBioBeta. He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry from Brown University, a Master's in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh, and an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Hull.