As manager of the Bioresource and Environmental Security department within the Applied Bioscience and Engineering group at Sandia National Laboratories, Damian Carrieri helps to set strategic directions and execute approaches to tackle challenges needed to support and assure a thriving bioeconomy. The department’s efforts focus on identifying and demonstrating strategies to upgrade renewable resources for biomanufacturing for fuels and chemicals and to perform ecosystem services like greenhouse gas, wastewater, and plastics utilization.
Before joining Sandia in 2021, Damian worked as a Principal Scientist at Lumen Bioscience in Seattle, Washington. Damian’s focus in the biotechnology industry was to improve photosynthetic biomass production and increase rates and yields of protein products from cyanobacteria. Damian led efforts to design, build, and commission a GMP-certified indoor pilot facility for production of orally consumable proteins. He later built a 96-member automated bioreactor scale-down facility for high throughput data collection with Machine Learning-assisted process optimization to improve this facility’s performance.
Damian has authored many publications with a research focus on cyanobacterial metabolism and photosynthesis and is an inventor on four issued patents in biotechnology. His postdoctoral research was with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and he holds a Ph.D. and master’s in Chemistry from Princeton University and bachelor’s degree from Washington and Jefferson College.