Dr. Mattheos A. G. Koffas

Career Development Associate Professor

Office: CBIS 4005D
Phone: 518-276-2220
E-mail: koffam@rpi.edu

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Education

B.S. National Technical University, Athens, Greece, 1994
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000

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Biography

Professor Mattheos Koffas, Ph.D., received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University in Athens, Greece in 1994. He then joined the graduate program of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT where he worked on improving amino acid biosynthesis from Corynebacterium glutamicum. After completing his Ph.D. in 2000, he joined DuPont’s Central Research and Development as a research scientist where he worked on engineering the carotenoid biosynthesis of an obligate methanotroph. In August of 2002 he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at SUNY Buffalo, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the summer of 2008. In January of 2011, Prof. Koffas moved to his current position at RPI. In his research career, Dr. Koffas has worked with a variety of microorganisms and natural products including amino acids, polyphenols, fatty acids and terpenoids. He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, more than 10 book chapters and holds 8 patents. He is a member of the Editorials Boards of various Journals in the area of Bioengineering. His research has been funded by Federal agencies (NIH and NSF), the State of New York (NYStem) and industrial partners (Evonik, Firstwave Technologies and Chromadex).

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Research Interests

Metabolic Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Industrial Microbiology, Natural Products

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Current Research

The overall research effort is focused on Network, Metabolic and Cellular Engineering that aims at improvement of cellular properties or design new metabolic circuits using molecular biology tools. Efforts in Network Engineering encompass two important components. First, we build biological circuits that allow us to monitor in vivo the intracellular levels of important metabolites that are precursors to numerous high-value chemicals. Second, we build circuits that are based on signaling pathways identified in nature in order to engineer artificial cell-cell communication schemes. Similarly, efforts in Metabolic and Cellular Engineering are focused on two main aspects: the modification of cellular pathways in order to achieve a specific phenotype and the evaluation of the phenotype of the resulting cells.

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Additional profiles available:
Faculty Profile -- RPI
Faculty Profile -- Biology Department
Faculty Profile -- Biotechnology Institute

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