 I'm Kevin Salomon, I'm a professor of agricultural and biological engineering here at Purdue and my lab, we study microbes and develop them for industrial processes. My particular domain is about how do we take resources from the farm, how do we convert those into products that people can use. Unlike other disciplines that might use metals or ceramics or chemicals, the material I work with is biology. And so we have to understand how biological systems work and then using more classical engineering techniques, we can then reprogram that, reorganize it, put that together so we can get new capabilities. I recently received the Department of Energy Early Career Award to study how certain classes of microbes degrade plant biomaterial and to develop new ways to control and enhance that. Animals and humans were able to convert food into energy that allows us to grow due to the actions of the microbes that live in their guts. For example, we have stomach acid that helps break down materials, those nutrients are absorbed and certain microbes can convert them into different vitamins and so on and so forth. The Department of Energy is looking at ways to make energy more effective and more widely available. In this case, we're looking at how these unique microbes that live in the guts of large herbivores can help us break down this abundant resource so that we can then convert them into more valuable fuels and other materials. We feed them things such as orange peel, corn stover, any plant material that we can find. We measure how well they grow in these materials, we look at what they degrade these materials into, at how well they degrade these materials and ultimately we try to figure out what genes are responsible for this degradation. And so we need to reverse engineer their process, we need to understand which enzymes are made when, how much of those enzymes are made and the sequence to more effectively degrade these materials and we want these processes to be applicable anywhere. So we don't want to make a solution just for Indiana, we want something that will work in California, that will work in England, that will work in Tanzania. Different countries, different regions have different materials and different organisms have different feedstocks and so we study the microbes from these different organisms so we get giraffes that might come from Africa, we'll have goats that we have from local farms in Indiana and they all have different microbes in their gut and those different organisms have different capabilities and we're trying to see what are the commonalities, what are the things that are most successful across these organisms. Given the biomass generation capacity of the US, if we were able to effectively leverage all of that material, we could probably replace about a third of the gasoline that we use right now. What I think is really fascinating about our field is that microbial technologies have the potential to sustainably replace many of the products that we take every day for granted. With the tools we have available to us, we can actually modify the types of compounds they can make and so they're actually making medicines such as insulin right now and so the potential is theoretically unlimited. We just need to figure out the most effective strategies to do that.