 An Army-funded researcher won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research in new enzyme production leading to the commercial, cost-effective synthesis of biofuels. Professor Francis Arnold is a Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. So I've been interested in how biology can be used in engineering to make everything from diagnostics to medicines to fuels to molecules, biology is a great chemist and she's also a great engineer. So I've been developing methods whereby we can use biology to solve problems in the real world. She is the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in its 117-year history. The Army provided a single investigator grant in the 1990s. Through this, Arnold demonstrated the ability to modify an enzyme that provided robust native activity but at higher temperatures. We've worked on a number of things that I think could have big impact on this soldier. Many years ago already, we started looking at how could you make liquid fuels in remote locations from resources that you could collect from the environment. We extended that into developing genetically modified organisms that now today make jet fuel. And I know we've flown black helicopters on jet fuel made from renewable resources. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory through the Army Research Office started funding the research in 2003 through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies in Santa Barbara, California. Specifically with ARL, we've been exploring how the chemistry of the biological world can make energetic molecules, how we can make fuels and chemicals, say for example in remote locations, and mostly exploring what are the methods that we can use to build better biology. Arnold furthered her research with the help of her students. Caltech has brains, a lot of really good brains. We have eager students who are willing to work on impossible things. And sometimes they even make them happen. So we have this collection of just brilliant young scientists who are looking for something useful that they can do with their ideas and their technologies. The Army continues to invest in groundbreaking research so it can adapt, innovate and integrate technology at speed and scale to maintain what officials call assured battlefield dominance into the future. I'm so excited about applying biology to solving problems and problems that will be important to the Army. Because biology makes things and the Army needs things, materials, chemicals, fuels. Biology can do this but we have to learn the basic principles of engineering biology. So one of the projects that I'm working on with ARL support is incorporating machine learning into our powerful directed evolution technology, blending these new ideas together so that we can reliably build biological things that will be useful.