Dr. Gjalt Huisman is the Founder & CEO of Embold Therapeutics, Inc. With a career spanning synthetic biology and biopharmaceutical innovation, he has a proven track record of leading teams to evolve enzymes for pharmaceutical manufacturing, engineer microbes for biomedical scaffold production, and transform human proteins into efficacious therapeutics. Gjalt spent more than 20 years at Codexis where he led programs for the commercial deployment of efficient enzymatic manufacturing processes for small molecules and mRNA therapeutics. Gjalt earned his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen (NL) and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School before transitioning to industry, where he has been at the forefront of engineering biology to solve industrial challenges. In his current role at Embold Therapeutics he leads the team that is advancing synthetic biology principles toward the diagnosis, discovery and development of therapeutic enzymes for neurodegenerative diseases with a focus on Parkinson’s Disease.