Biography
Prof. “Patrick” Yizhi Cai (PC) received a bachelor degree in Computer Science in China, a master degree in Bioinformatics from University of Edinburgh in the UK, and a PhD in Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech in the USA. Prof. Cai had his postdoctoral fellowship under Jef Boeke in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prof. Cai serves as a senior scientific consultant to Beijing Genomics Institute and is the first Autodesk Distinguished Scholar. From 2013 to 2017, Prof. Cai had his own research group at the University of Edinburgh with a prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship, and his lab focuses on Computer Assisted Design for Synthetic Biology, NeoChromosome design and synthesis in the yeast, and DNA assembly automation.
In the summer of 2017, Prof. Cai moved to the University of Manchester as the new chair professor in synthetic genomics. As a world-leading expert in synthetic chromosomes, with a highly interdisciplinary research group, Prof. Cai’s team published 7 research articles in the journal of Science and featured on its cover in 2017. PC is the international coordinator for the (Sc2.0) Consortium, which is composed of over 10 top universities from 4 continents aiming to synthesize the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome. PC founded Edinburgh Genome Foundry, which is the largest automated DNA synthesis and assembly facility in academia today. PC regularly provides advice and consultancies to the Cabinet office, the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technologies. PC holds prestigious visiting professorships with MIT (US), MRC LMB at Cambridge (UK), Hong Kong University and Chinese Academy of Sciences (China).
In 2022, Prof. Cai was awarded by EPSRC with a 5 years fellowship to work on biosecurity and biosafety mechanisms for synthetic genomes. In 2023, he was awarded a ERC Consolidator Award to engineer non-coding RNAs using a synthetic genomics approach.