Appointment(s)
Dean’s Chair in Medicine and Associate Professor, National University of Singapore
Executive Director, Singapore National Centre for Engineering Biology (NCEB)
Director, Singapore Consortium for Synthetic Biology (SINERGY)
Director, Wilmar-NUS Corporate Laboratory (WIL@NUS)
Director, NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI)
Director, NUS Medicine Synthetic Biology Translational Research Program
Degree(s)
Ph.D. University of Maryland
B.S. Seoul National University
Biography
Professor Matthew Chang is the Executive Director of the Singapore National Centre for Engineering Biology. He concurrently serves as the Director of the Singapore Consortium for Synthetic Biology, the Wilmar-NUS Corporate Laboratory, and the NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation. He holds the Dean’s Chair in Medicine and is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and is the Director of Synthetic Biology Translational Research Programme.
Professor Chang has made significant contributions to the programming of microbial cells for novel biological functions, documented in over 130 publications. His scientific achievements have been recognized with accolades such as the National Research Foundation of Singapore’s Investigatorship Award, the NUHS-Mochtar Riady Pinnacle Research Excellence Award, the Presidential Award from the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific and Technological Achievement Award, among others. Furthermore, his work has garnered over 300 media recognitions worldwide, highlighting his substantial impact on the scientific community and beyond.
Beyond his research, Professor Chang is a committed educator and advocate for synthetic biology. He has delivered more than 180 invited presentations at key scientific forums worldwide and plays a crucial role in editorial capacities for over 15 leading scientific journals. He also plays an advisory role in major international research initiatives, including the CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. Professor Chang has been instrumental in founding the Asian Synthetic Biology Association and the Global Biofoundry Alliance and currently co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology.
As an Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Professor Chang has shaped the careers of over 50 undergraduates and high school students, 25 PhD students, and 50 research scientists, many of whom have assumed leadership roles across academia, government, and industry. A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration, he works to integrate engineering, biology, medicine, and the social sciences, thereby fostering innovation and enhancing public engagement in science. Through his leadership, research, and outreach, Professor Chang continues to advance the boundaries of synthetic biology, inspiring the next generation of scientists and making significant contributions to the global scientific community.
Research Areas/Research Interest
The 21st century began with the complete sequencing of the human genome. At the same time, we also witnessed an exponential increase in genome sequencing of microbes. As of April 2013, more than 3,500 microbial genomes have been fully sequenced and are available to the public. This remarkable accomplishment provided the groundwork for a revolutionary advance in our way of studying and designing microbial systems. That is, we are now able to understand the interacting networks of biological molecules including genes and proteins at the systems level, and based on this understanding, we can effectively engineer complex biological systems that can perform desired functions. This technological advancement along with the development of other key enabling techniques such as gene synthesis contributed to the birth of the new interdisciplinary research field named synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology aims to engineer genetically modified biological systems that perform novel functions that do not exist in nature, with reusable, standard interchangeable biological parts. The use of these standard biological parts enables the exploitation of common engineering principles such as standardization, decoupling, and abstraction for synthetic biology (Endy, 2005). With this engineering framework in place, we can design and construct new biological parts, devices, and systems, and redesign existing, natural biological systems for engineering applications. Certainly, synthetic biology has the potential to make the construction of novel biological systems a predictable, reliable, systematic process. While the development of most synthetic biological systems remains largely ad hoc, recent efforts to implement an engineering framework in synthetic biology have provided long-awaited evidences that engineering principles can facilitate the construction of novel biological systems. Synthetic biology has so far demonstrated that its framework can be applied to a wide range of areas such as energy, environment, and health care. For example, novel biological systems have been constructed to produce drugs (Ro et al, 2006) and biofuels (Steen et al, 2010), to degrade containments in water (Sinha et al, 2010), and to kill cancer cells (Anderson et al, 2006).
My current and future research focuses on integrating this emerging field of synthetic biology with engineering principles to provide solutions to overcome critical problems of national significance related to human health, food, and energy. Toward this vision, my research group aims to elucidate underlying cellular mechanisms at the systems level, and to design engineering strategies for constructing microbes that perform novel programmable and controllable functions exploitable for various applications, with specific emphasis on synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and systems microbial engineering. Specifically, in this statement, I describe three overarching research thrusts that address medical, food and energy needs: (i) Development of therapeutic microbes for infection treatment, (ii) Development of probiotic microbes as functional dietary supplements, and (ii) Development of synthetic microbes for valuable chemical production. I envision that these research thrusts will substantially benefit not only the Department and the University but also broad academic as well as industrial communities, ultimately contributing to the global society.
Prodrug-conjugated tumor-seeking commensals for targeted cancer therapy
Shen H, Zhang C, Li S, Liang Y, Lee LT, Aggarwal N, Wun KS, Liu J, Nadarajan SP, Weng C, Ling H, Tay JK, Wang DY, Yao SQ, Hwang IY, Lee YS, Chang MW
Establishing chromosomal design-build-test-learn through a synthetic chromosome and its combinatorial reconfiguration
Foo JL, Kitano S, Susanto AV, Jin Z, Lin Y, Luo Z, Huang L, Liang Z, Mitchell LA, Yang K, Wong A, Cai Y, Cai J, Stracquadanio G, Bader JS, Boeke JD, Dai J, Chang MW
Microbial engineering strategies to utilize waste feedstock for sustainable bioproduction
Aggarwal N, Pham HL, Ranjan B, Saini M, Liang Y, Hossain GS, Ling H, Foo JL, Chang MW
Engineering probiotics to inhibit Clostridioides difficile infection by dynamic regulation of intestinal metabolism
Koh E, Hwang IY, Lee HL, De Sotto R, Lee JWJ, Lee YS, March JC, Chang MW
Engineered commensal microbes for diet-mediated colorectal-cancer chemoprevention
Ho CL, Tan HQ, Chua KJ, Kang A, Lim KH, Ling KL, Yew WS, Lee YS, Thiery JP, Chang MW
Engineering a riboswitch-based genetic platform for the self-directed evolution of acid-tolerant phenotypes
Pham HL, Wong A, Chua N, Teo WS, Yew WS, Chang MW
Engineered probiotic Escherichia coli can eliminate and prevent Pseudomonas aeruginosa gut infection in animal models
Hwang IY, Koh E, Wong A, March JC, Bentley WE, Lee YS, Chang MW
A Two-Layer Gene Circuit for Decoupling Cell Growth from Metabolite Production
Lo T-M, Chng SH, Teo WS, Cho H-S, Chang MW
