Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. in Physics from Zhejiang University (China) in 2002 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California at San Diego in 2007. Prior to joining UIUC in 2011, Dr. Lu was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, MIT, and Wyss Institute at Harvard. Dr. Lu’s research focuses on the analysis, construction and utilization of bacterial gene regulatory networks for cellular functionality programming. He has received several awards for his research, including ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering.