Professor Jason Chin receives his honorary degree in a ceremony at ETH, photo courtesy ETH/Alessandro Della Bella
Professor Jason Chin has received an honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich to honour his outstanding achievements in the field of synthetic biology.
Jason received the honorary doctorate “in recognition of his outstanding scientific work and his important contribution to science".
Jason, who is a Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology in this department, and joint Head of Division of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division, said: "This is a wonderful recognition of all the amazing things that the talented people I have worked with have achieved. It is a great pleasure to receive this notable distinction from my outstanding colleagues at ETH.”
Research
Jason's research has revolutionised the field of synthetic biology with the development of foundational strategies to expand the genetic code of living organisms to increase and diversify the chemical building blocks that cells use to make proteins. Building on this, his group has explored strategies for the encoded cellular synthesis of non-canonical biopolymers. He has applied the strategies he has developed to provide diverse, new biological insights.
To reprogramme the genetic code, Jason created new translational machinery (including orthogonal ribosomes and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and tRNAs). He then completely synthesised a bacterial genome in which he reduced the number of sense codons in its genetic code. The codons thus unused were reassigned to encode the synthesis of non-canonical polymers and macrocycles and proteins containing non-canonical amino acids. Jason’s fundamental advances have been widely used to drive discovery, including to define the molecular consequences of post-translational modifications, define protein interactions in cells, and provide mechanistic insight into enzymes. In recent work Jason has accelerated genome synthesis, expanded the scope of translation to non-canonical monomers beyond alpha-L-amino acids, and developed new approaches for accelerated continuous evolution.
Honours and awards
Jason was an undergraduate at Oxford University, received his Ph.D. as a Fulbright Awardee at Yale University, and was a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute. His work has been recognized by several awards, including; the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (Royal Society, 2009), the Corday Morgan Prize (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2010), the EMBO Gold Medal (European Molecular Biology Organization, 2010), the Louis Jeantet Young Investigator Career Award (Jeantet Foundation, 2011), the Sackler International Prize in Physical Sciences (Tel Aviv University, 2019), and the Meyerhof Medal and Lecture (Max Planck Institute Heidelberg, 2021). He is a member of EMBO, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2023 Jason was appointed as a non-executive member of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) Board.
With thanks to the LMB news team for their kind permission to reprint this article.