Assistant Professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto

Keith Pardee is an Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto. He works at the interface of synthetic biology and human health, focusing on the potential of moving synthetic biology outside of the cell. Rather than using cells to host engineered genetic programs, his lab are creating programmable materials with the transcription and translation properties of a cell.

During his post-doctoral work with Jim Collins (MIT/Harvard University) at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Keith developed the first safe and sterile method to deploy gene circuits out of the lab, creating a platform for programmable in vitro diagnostics. His lab continues to extend this work, developing cell-free technologies for rapid molecular prototyping, and integrating in vitro synthetic gene networks into new materials and applications.