John Cumbers
British molecular biologist and founder of SynBioBeta
John Robert Cumbers (born 1979) is a British molecular biologist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is founder and chief executive officer of SynBioBeta which promotes synthetic biology to build a more sustainable universe. He founded BetaSpace, a space settlement innovation network aimed at sustaining human life on and off our planet and is an operating partner at DCVC, a firm in Silicon Valley focused on investments in biotechnology.
Education and early life
John Cumbers was born on October 5, 1979, in Watford, Hertfordshire, Eastern England, 15 miles north-west of London. Since childhood, he showed a keen interest in biology and information technology.
Cumbers attended Queens' School in Bushey, Hertfordshire for high school.
In 2004, he obtained his BSc in Computer Science with Information Engineering at the University of Hull, a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire. For his master's in science and bioinformatics, he studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He obtained his PhD in molecular biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University, under the supervision of Lynn J. Rothschild at NASA Ames Research Center where they initiated a program in space synthetic biology for NASA.
Career
After obtaining his doctorate, Cumbers served as lead for the Planetary Sustainability Initiative of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US federal agency responsible for aerospace research, aeronautics and the civilian space program. Between 2008 and 2015, Cumbers worked at the NASA Ames Research Center as a student and then contractor bioengineer and co-organized the first workshop on the applications of synthetic biology for space exploration.
“John Cumbers” enters the record as british molecular biologist and founder of SynBioBeta. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Cumbers and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Cumbers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.