Costas D. Maranas, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, will discuss his research Wednesday (Oct. 28) as part of the 2009 J.D. Lindsay Lecture Series at Texas A&M University.

Maranas’ presentation, “Using Computations to Reconstruct, Analyze and Redesign Metabolism,” is scheduled from 3 to 4 p.m. in Room 106 of the Jack E. Brown Building. His presentation is sponsored by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

Maranas will discuss speeding up the process of building organism-specific metabolic models by automatically filling in connectivity gaps and restoring consistency with gene essentiality experiments. His presentation will highlight ongoing genome-scale reconstruction efforts in his research group and explore how computations can help elucidate metabolic flows using isotope labeling experiments. The latest optimization based techniques will also be described for strain optimization leading to the microbial overproduction of targeted compounds including chemicals identified as promising biofuels.

The Donald B. Broughton Professor at Penn State, Maranas’ research interests include computational protein design; reconstruction, curation and analysis of metabolic networks; microbial strain optimization; design of biological circuits and synthetic biology; signaling networks and multi-scale modeling in cancer biology, network science, optimization theory and algorithms.

Maranas earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1990 at Aristotle University in Greece. He then received his master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1992 at Princeton University before earning his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1995 from Princeton.

He is the recipient of the Allan P. Colburn Award for Excellence in Publication and a member of the editorial boards for “Biophysical Journal, Computers & Chemical Engineering” and “Metabolic Engineering.” He also is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.

In honor of Professor J.D. Lindsay, Texas A&M’s first chemical engineering department head, the department established the Lindsay Lecture Series to bring speakers to the university. Coming from both industry and academia, the lecturers are recognized for their accomplishments in the practice, teaching and/or research of chemical engineering. The series also allows the lecturers several days for visiting the university and the department and for exchanging ideas on teaching and research objectives and methods.

Written by Ryan Garcia, ryan.garcia99@tamu.edu

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