Welcome to the Biomass Conversion Laboratory website.   Our research and education activities are primarily focused on industrial biotechnology solutions to energy and environmental challenges.  We very much enjoy exploring research problems that are at the interface between biological and physical sciences.  Our success in exploring these problems hinges on the strong collaborative relationships that we have established with molecular biologists, microbiologists, plant biologists, systems biologists, applied physicists and material scientists.  It is through these collaborative relationships that we are able to develop new methods and evolve new research paradigms.  Many of the research projects and results that are presented on this website reflect on the contribution of our collaboration, and they capture the commitment of our broader team to addressing energy and  environmental challenges through science and engineering. In addition, many of the projects involve empirical and mathematical modeling to glean insights into industrial biotechnology problems.

    A core element of our success in exploring and addressing research problems at the interface of  biological and physical sciences is having access to state-of-the-art research facilities.  Many of the projects described in this web-site are being facilitated by Cornell’s Biofuels Research Laboratory (BRL) – which contains 11,500 square feet of space in the East Wing of Riley-Robb Hall.  The BRL was designed and built to address biological barriers to the development of cellulosic biofuels such as ethanol, butanol, hydrogen and methane. Within the walls of this laboratory are ten different facilities designed to enhance our ability to address physical, chemical and biological barriers to liberating sugars from energy crops, such as switchgrass, cold tolerant sorghum, and woody biomass, and to biologically convert these sugars into biofuels.  There is an advanced imaging laboratory to carry-out single molecule studies of cellulases and other plant cell wall degrading enzymes, robotics platforms for high-throughput screening of microorganisms and enzyme cocktails, analytical equipment such as LC-MS, FPLC and FTNIR for measuring and purifying secondary metabolites and assessing chemical compositions of biomass streams, and a number of thermochemical reactors for pretreating biomass material and for microbial conversion.  In addition, there is office space designed to accommodate researchers from different disciplines that are part of our broader biofuels community, and to provide the environment for them to share research methods, insights and perspective, which is essential for multidisciplinary research projects.