Sloan Fellowship Will Help New Faculty Patrick Shih Investigate Ancient Origins of Photosynthesis
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Those words were written on the blackboard of famed physicist Richard Feynman when he passed away in February 1988. For Assistant Professor Patrick Shih, Department of Plant Biology and the director of plant biosystems design at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, Feynman’s words epitomize his own goals to use synthetic biology to understand the origins of photosynthesis.
“If you can’t build something up, you clearly don’t know all the components,” said Shih. “Biology is a bit backwards in the sense that we did not build life and yet, we’re still trying to engineer it, so that’s kind of where I think synthetic biology comes in, where we’re trying to understand how we actually build aspects of the cell or rebuild small facets of biology.”
Trained as a molecular evolutionary biologist, Shih was recently selected as a 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. The fellowship will help fund his research to reconstruct the evolution of photosynthesis, a process that originated billions of years ago.