I am harnessing the awesome power of metabolic engineering, protein engineering and synthetic biology to optimize the production of bespoke metabolites in both crop and microorganisms, with a particular interest in proteins and lipids. My early work focused on the engineering of enzymes that are involved in plant and yeast lipid metabolism using rational protein design and directed evolution. More recently, I have undertaken extensive work on combinatorial metabolic engineering of vegetative plant parts (leaf, stem, root...) to accumulate high levels of valuable plant oils that are normally stored only in certain seeds. Currently, I am extending synthetic biology principles into the plant kingdom to lift plant metabolic engineering and forward/reverse genetics to a high throughput level. Finally, I have expanded my interest into the area of precision fermentation for the production of high-value food ingredients. In my cross-cutting roles as an Application Domain Leader for the CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform and as the Novel Protein Production Systems Lead for the CSIRO Protein Mission, I contribute to building a multidisciplinary Precision fermentation/Biomanufacturing research pipeline within CSIRO. I obtained my MSc and PhD degrees at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (Ghent University, Belgium). Following my PhD in collaboration with Bayer BioScience (Zwijnaarde, Belgium), I took up a postdoctoral fellow in the plant oil engineering group of Dr. Surinder Singh at CSIRO Plant Industry.