Professor Paul Freemont is the co-founder of the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation and co-founder and co-director of the National UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Synthetic Biology (SynbiCITE - since 2013). He is also director of the London BioFoundry (since 2016) and Head of the Section of Structural and Synthetic Biology in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College. He was previously the Head of the Division of Molecular Biosciences and Centre for Structural Biology having joined Imperial from Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (now known as the Crick Research Institute) where he was Principal Investigator and Head of Group. His recent research is focused on developing automation and biofoundries and cell-free systems for specific synthetic biology applications He is author of over 300 scientific publications and is an elected member of European Molecular Biology Organisation and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Society of Medicine and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. He was a co-author of the British Government’s UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap and was a recent member of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on synthetic biology for the United Nations Convention for Biological Diversity. He is a council member of the US Engineering Biology Research Consortium and co-chair of the newly formed UK Governments Ministerial Engineering Biology Advisory Panel and sits on the UK Governments Engineering Biology Responsible Innovation Advisory Panel. He recently led leading a US-funded Task Force on Engineering Biology Metrics and Technical Standards for Global Bioeconomy. He is also co-founder and founding chair of the Global Biofoundry Alliance. He is a passionate advocate for the commercialisation of engineering biology and is co-founder of the Imperial spin-out Solena Materials Ltd developing designer protein fibres and also of SynBioVen Ltd, an early-stage seed investment company for engineering biology start-ups in the UK.