Microbial Production of High-Value Products

Bernd Rehm  received his MSc and PhD degrees (microbiology) from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He continued as a postdoc at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. From 1996 to 2003, he was a research group leader at the Institute of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology at the University of Münster, Germany, where he also completed his habilitation. In 2003 he was appointed as Associate Professor and in 2005 promoted to Full Professor/Chair of Microbiology at Massey University in New Zealand. From 2013 to 2016 he was principal investigator of the Centre of Research Excellence (New Zealand) at the MacDiarmid Institute of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. He was recently appointed as director of the Centre for Cell Factories and Biopolymer at Griffith University (Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, Australia).

He is editor-in-chief and editor of 5 scientific journals as well as an editorial board member of 10 scientific journals and the sole editor of 5 books. He has authored over 200 scientific publications and holds more than 30 patents. His R&D interests are in the microbial production of polymers and their applications. His recent studies focused on the use of engineered microorganisms to produce functionalized nano-/micro-structures for applications in diagnostics, enzyme immobilization, and antigen delivery. 

David Wibowo  is currently a Bioprocess Scientist in Pharma Services Group at Thermo Fisher Scientific (Australia).

He was previously working as a Research Fellow at Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, Griffith University (Australia). He is leading one of the new research avenues in the Centre for Cell Factories and Biopolymers within the Institute, focusing on the development of bio-based polyester particles as effective cancer delivery systems for drugs and vaccines. He also establishes collaborative research development in this area nationally and internationally.

Prior to Griffith, David was the Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, University of Queensland (Australia). In this role, David led efforts aimed at the large-scale production of silica nanocapsules that he co-invented and their utilities in an agricultural sector. He also actively contributed to broaden the applications of the nanocapsules as an emerging nanocarrier of chemotherapeutic drugs, and benchmarked their performances to other systems like liposomes and PLGA nanoparticles.

David received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Queensland in 2015. During his PhD, David co-authored a patent, which now covers Australia (granted), Europe, US, and Canada, that describes a sustainable dual-templating platform technology based on mineralizing biosurfactants for making core-shell silica nanoparticles (also called as nanocapsules).