Tae Seok Moon, Ph.D. is a professor at J. Craig Venter Institute in the synthetic biology group. Prior or joining JCVI, he was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis in the McKelvey School of Engineering. His research goals are to understand and engineer biological networks that genes and cellular processes use to solve energy, environmental, agricultural, and health problems. He has a broad background in systems and synthetic biology, with expertise in the development of engineered cells for practical applications.

His body of work includes engineering probiotic bacteria for medical applications, engineering bacteria to enable efficient production of biofuels, biomaterials, and chemicals from biomass and waste plastics, developing biocontainment strategies to prevent the spread of GMOs in the environment, building application-relevant biosensors and dynamic sensor-regulators, understanding and engineering microbiota and microbiota-host interactions using computational and experimental approaches, engineering biology for space exploration and engineered living materials, preventing antibiotic resistance spread by implementing engineering approaches, and engineering predictable RNA regulators.

Dr. Moon is committed to mentoring young researchers. In addition to students and postdoctoral researchers in his lab, he has mentored iGEM student teams and provided teaching kits to high school teachers and K-12 students. He founded and administers the weekly SynBYSS seminar series, which features a rising young scientist paired with a seasoned investigator. He is also the chair of the inaugural in-person SynBYSS conference.

Dr. Moon earned his BS and MS in chemical technology from Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea, and a Ph.D. under the guidance of Kristala Prather in chemical engineering with a minor in biological chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Christopher Voigt Group in the Department of Biological Engineering & Synthetic Biology Center at MIT and in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California-San Francisco.