John Gladden

Manager, Biomaterials & Biomanufacturing

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Manager, Biomaterials & Biomanufacturing

jmgladd@sandia.gov

(925) 294-3607

Sandia National Laboratories, California
 P.O. Box 969
 Livermore, CA 94551-0969

Biography

John Gladden has 25 years of experience in bioscience and biomanufacturing, including bioengineering of non-model microbes and development of conversion technologies for a wide range of feedstocks derived from industry, agriculture and forestry. He has been a leader in a number of DOE-funded projects, such as the Joint Bioenergy Institute (jbei.org) and the Agile Biofoundry (agilebiofoundry.org) that have focused on engineering fungi to produce a portfolio of biofuels and biochemicals in addition to developing pretreatment and deconstruction technologies for lignocellulosic and other plant-based biomass. This work involves extensive partnerships with other national laboratories, academia, and industry.

John’s expertise in biomanufacturing has focused on developing non-model fungi into platform organisms able to produce fuels and chemicals from a divers set of carbon sources. This work includes building genetic toolsets for bioengineering, metabolic modeling, multi-omics analysis, development of high-throughput bioengineering pipelines, extensive process development and optimization, and bioprocess scaling from microtiter plates to mid-scale bioreactors. John takes a wholistic approach to biomanufacturing and focuses on both metabolic engineering of catabolism to enable bioconversion of diverse carbon streams as well as optimization of biosynthetic pathways to tune an organism to produce high titer, rates and yields of bioproducts.

John’s expertise extends to biomass deconstruction technologies where he has extensive experience in developing chemical and biological processes to liberate bioavailable carbon streams from many types of lignocellulosic biomass (hardwoods, softwoods, grasses municipal waste, etc.) as well as carbon-rich industrial wastes. This work involves thermochemical pretreatment and chemical/enzymatic deconstruction of biopolymers into fermentable sugars, aromatics and organic acids. John’s team has developed small-scale high-throughput thermochemical pipelines to expediate discovery and process optimization efforts, then translates those discoveries into affordable and scalable technologies.

John’s work has resulted in over 100 publications and a rich portfolio of intellectual property that is actively being leveraged by industry partners. He is constantly seeking opportunities to advance the biosciences and explore new ways in which biology can transform our economy and better our lives.

Projects

  • With colleagues at PNNL, leads the Fungal Biotechnology team to engineer fungi to both be platform enzyme production hosts and robust lignocellulose conversion hosts. Establishes protein production baseline and initiate “omics” analysis
  • Engineers fungi to express biomass-derived polysaccharide and lignin depolymerizing enzymes
  • Engineers fungi to convert both lignocellulose-derived sugars and lignin-derived aromatics to biofuels and bioproducts
  • Leads the Biomass Pretreatment and Process Development Team
  • Develops and optimizes novel IL and DES pretreatment technologies
  • Develops integrated pretreatment to fuels technologies

Selected Publications

Featured Intellectual Property