Professor Paul Freemont is the co-founder of the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation and co-founder and co-director of the National UK Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Synthetic Biology (SynbiCITE - since 2013). He is also director of the London BioFoundry (since 2016) and Head of the Section of Structural and Synthetic Biology in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College. He was previously the Head of the Division of Molecular Biosciences and Centre for Structural Biology having joined Imperial from Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (now known as the Crick Research Institute) where he was a Principle Investigator and Head of Group. His research interests are focused on developing synthetic biology foundational tools, automation and biofoundries and cell-free systems for specific applications including biosensing, metabolic and protein engineering and synthetic cells. He is author of over 300 scientific publications and is an elected member of European Molecular Biology Organisation and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Society of Medicine and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. He was a co-author of the British Government’s UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap and was a recent member of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on synthetic biology for the United Nations Convention for Biological Diversity (UN-CBD). He is currently a council member of the US Engineering Biology Research Consortium and chair of the EBRC Policy and International Engagement Working Group. He was a member of the UK governments Office for Science and Technology Engineering Biology sub-group which led to the development of the UK governments National Engineering Biology Vision launched in Dec 2023. He also sits on the newly formed UK governments Biosecurity Leadership Council and is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology. He is also currently leading a US-funded Task Force on Engineering Biology Metrics and Technical Standards for Global Bioeconomy.  He also co-founded the Global Biofoundry Alliance, an organisation comprising 36 institutions worldwide and he is currently the Chair of the GBA. In terms of commercialisation, he is co-founder of the Imperial spin-out Solena Materials Ltd and also of SynBioVen Ltd, an early stage seed investment company for engineering biology start-ups in the UK.