Synthetic Biologist
Synthetic Biologist

Biography

Robert Egbert is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He has two decades of professional expertise spanning national security, synthetic biology, and biosecurity. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Persistence Control Science Focus Area (PerCon SFA), a seven-institution consortium funded through the Secure Biosystems Design program of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER). PerCon SFA aims to discover the genetic basis for the environmental persistence of rhizosphere microbiomes that benefit bioenergy cropping systems and to develop novel biocontainment strategies to control engineered microbial functions in complex environments. Dr. Egbert advises national security programs at PNNL, has been a co-investigator on numerous Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) programs, and he has consulted for multiple startup companies in Seattle and the Bay Area. 

Dr. Egbert is Chair of PNNL’s Institutional Biosafety Committee and a council member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, a public-private partnership to advance engineering biology to advance national and global needs. As a trainee, his interactions with diverse research communities included DNA nanotechnology (National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing, Molecular Programming Project), stochastic biochemical networks (Banff International Research Station), and genome-scale engineering of bacteria (DOE BER Biosystems Design).

Disciplines and Skills

Postdoctoral research in genomics & synthetic biology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory / University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Education

  • PhD in Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
  • BS in Electrical Engineering, Brigham Young University

Affiliations and Professional Service

  • Institutional Biosafety Committee Chair, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (2022-present)
  • Council member, Engineering Biology Research Consortium (2021-present)
  • Participant, Workshop on Biosafety and Biosecurity Oversight of Dual Use Research of Concern and Potential Pandemic Pathogens (2024)
  • Reviewer, Army Research Laboratory Panel on the Assessment of Biological and Biotechnology Sciences (2024)
  • Mentor, PNNL-Oregon State University Distinguished Graduate Research Program (2022-2024)
  • Plenary speaker, First International Conference on Biosafety and Biosecurity Towards One Health:Challenges and Opportunities in the Asia-Pacific Region (2022)

Publications

  • Van Fossen EM, Kroll JO, Anderson LN, McNaughton AD, Herrera D, Oda Y, Wilson AJ, Nelson WC, Kumar N, Frank AR, Elmore JR, Handakumbura P, Lin VS, Egbert RG. “Profiling sorghum- microbe interactions with a specialized photoaffinity probe identifies key sorgoleone binders in Acinetobacter pittii.” Applied and Environmental Microbiology (2024).
  • Fonseca-García C, Pettinga D, Wilson A, Elmore JR, McClure R, Atim J, Pedraza J, Hutmacher R, Turumtay H, Tian Y, Eudes A, Scheller HV, Egbert RG, Coleman-Derr D. “Defined synthetic microbial communities colonize and benefit field-grown sorghum.” The ISME Journal (2024).
  • Jansson JK, McClure R & Egbert RG. “Soil microbiome engineering for sustainability in a changing environment.” Nature Biotechnology 41, 1716–1728 (2023).
  • Elmore JR, Dexter GN, Baldino H, Huenemann JD, Francis R, Peabody GLV, Martinez-Baird J, Riley LA, Simmons T, Coleman-Derr D, Guss AM, Egbert RG (2023). “High-throughput genetic engineering of nonmodel and undomesticated bacteria via iterative site-specific genome integration.” Science Advances 9(10): eade1285.
  • Chang CH, Nelson WC, Jerger A, Wright AT, Egbert RG, McDermott JE (2023). “Snekmer: a scalable pipeline for protein sequence fingerprinting based on amino acid recoding.” Bioinformics Advances 3(1): vbad005.
  • Tschirhart T, Shukla V, Kelly EE, Schultzhaus Z, NewRingeisen E, Erickson JS, Wang Z, Garcia W, Curl E, Egbert RG, Yeung E & Vora G (2019). “Synthetic Biology Tools for the Fast-Growing Marine Bacterium Vibrio natriegens.” ACS synthetic biology, 8(9), 2069-2079.
  • Egbert RG, Rishi HS, Adler BA, McCormick DM, Toro E, Gill RT, & Arkin AP (2019). “A versatile platform strain for high-fidelity multiplex genome editing.” Nucleic Acids Research 47(6), 3244-3256.
  • Venturelli OS, Egbert RG & Arkin AP (2016). “Towards engineering biological systems in a broader context.” Journal of Molecular Biology, 428 (5), 928-944.
  • Egbert RG & Klavins E (2012). “Fine-tuning gene networks using simple sequence repeats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109:16817-22.(cover feature, see also commentary by Prindle and Hasty).
  • Jang SH, Oishi KT, Egbert RG, Klavins E (2012). “Specification and simulation of synthetic multicelled behaviors.” ACS Synthetic Biology, 1:365-374.