Dr. Noam Prywes

Dr. Prywes began his postdoctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science this past year, where he worked on RuBisCO-dependent E. coli evolution. This coming year at Weizmann, his project, dealing with making carbon fixation more efficient, will involve collaboration with the newly-formed Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. Potentially such research could lead to reducing the amount of land used for crop production, with important possible implications for global food productivity and security, as well as for the global energy supply.

Although his PhD from Harvard was in chemistry, he is interested in using our understanding of metabolism and the emerging field of synthetic biology for the benefit of humanity.

At Harvard, he organized and hosted a “journal club”, finding multidisciplinary speakers who presented an academic topic of their choice in a setting that encouraged questions. Topics included magnetosensation in pigeons, the epidemiology of Ebola, the nitrogen cycle on the earth, CRISPR and quantum computing and many non-scientific topics.  Dr. Prywes also served as a volunteer tutor with the Boston University College in Prison Program at a Massachusetts Correctional Institution. He comments that his students there were unfailingly enthusiastic, deeply engaged and startlingly insightful.