Research Focus
Michelle A. O’Malley earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. She holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware, where she worked with Prof. Anne Robinson to engineer overproduction of membrane proteins in yeast. O’Malley was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, where she developed new strategies for cellulosic biofuel production. She joined the Chemical Engineering faculty at UC-Santa Barbara in 2012, and her research group engineers protein synthesis within anaerobes and consortia for sustainable chemical production, bioremediation, and natural product discovery.
O’Malley was named one of the 35 Top Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2015, and is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) – the highest honor awarded to early career researchers by the US government. She has also been recognized with a DOE Early Career Award, an NSF CAREER award, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Allan P. Colburn Memorial Lectureship at the University of Delaware, an ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award, a Hellman Faculty Fellowship, and a Rising Star Award from the Women’s Chemists Committee of the American Chemical Society.
Projects
- Discovery & characterization of novel lignin-degrading mechanisms from anaerobic fungi and microbial communities
Featured Media
How Fungal Enzymes Break Down Cell Walls
Fungal Enzymes Team Up to More Efficiently Break Down Cellulose
Yes, you can have a life outside the lab
Getting the Most Out of Your Postdoc
What Biofuel Production Can Learn from the Zoo
Can Goat Poop Overpower Fossil Fuels
Gut Feeling: How Animals Can Transform Renewables
Fungi from goats’ guts could lead to better biofuels
Biofuel from Fungi: barnyard poop has potential to be broken down and turned into energy
35 Innovators Under 35, 2015, MIT Technology Review
Horse manure yields secret to ethanol fuel
Featured Publications
Complete list on GoogleScholar.
- “The importance of sourcing enzymes from non-conventional fungi for metabolic engineering & biomass breakdown”, Metabolic Engineering (2017)
- “A parts list for fungal cellulosomes revealed by comparative genomics”, Nature Microbiology (2017)
- “Widespread adenine N6-methylation of active genes in fungi”, Nature Genetics (2017)
- “Engineering live cell surfaces with functional polymers via cytocompatible controlled radical polymerization”, Nature Chemistry (2017)
- “Mapping the membrane proteome of anaerobic fungi identifies a wealth of carbohydrate binding proteins and transporters”, Microbial Cell Factories (2016)
- “Early-branching gut fungi possess a large, comprehensive array of biomass-degrading enzymes”, Science (2016)
- “Robust and effective methodologies for cryopreservation and DNA extraction from anaerobic gut fungi”, Anaerobe (2016)
- “Driving biomass breakdown through engineered cellulosomes”, Bioengineered (2015)
- “Anaerobic gut fungi: advances in isolation, culture, and cellulolytic enzyme discovery for biofuel production”, Biotechnology & Bioengineering (2014)
- “Extracting data from the muck: deriving biological insight from complex microbial communities and non-model organisms with next-generation sequencing”, Current Opinion in Biotechnology (2014)