Matthew Chang


Matthew Wook Chang is a Korean American synthetic biologist based in Singapore. He is a professor and Provost's Chair in Medicine at the Synthetic Biology Translational Programme and Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.
Chang's research focuses on studying the engineering of biology to develop autonomous, programmable cells for biomedical and biomanufacturing applications. He has made significant contributions to synthetic biology, authoring over 130 scholarly publications.

Education

Chang graduated with Bachelor of Science , Chemical and Biological Engineering from Seoul National University in 1998. He then completed a PhD at the University of Maryland's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2003.

Career and research

After graduating from his PhD, Chang worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Office of Pesticide Programs of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency for a year. From 2004 to 2007, he was a research assistant professor at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute's Center for Biosystems Research.
In 2007, he moved to Singapore to join the Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor at the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. He later joined National University of Singapore in 2013.
At NUS, Chang is the director of the NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation, which is the university's focal synthetic biology research program. Concurrently, he is also director of the Wilmar-NUS Corporate Laboratory, a research partnership between NUS and the agribusiness company Wilmar International Limited, and the Singapore Consortium for Synthetic Biology, an initiative that promotes research discussions across academia, industry, and government.
Chang's research focuses on studying the engineering of biology to develop autonomous, programmable cells for biomedical and biomanufacturing applications across various industries. Along with colleague Poh Chueh Loo, his group is widely recognised for the use of synthetic biology to tackle infectious diseases. He engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to 'seek and kill' Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an invasive bacterium known to cause pneumonia and other illnesses. Later on, he engineered probiotic E. coli to inhibit Clostridioides difficile infection, a leading cause of healthcare-associated infectious diarrhoea worldwide.
Beyond infectious disease, Chang and his colleagues have engineered bacteria that selectively target colorectal cancer cells, destroying them by converting a compound naturally found in cruciferous vegetables into a potent anticancer agent.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of Biotechnology Notes. He co-led the establishment of the Asian Synthetic Biology Association and the Global Biofoundry Alliance. He is also part of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology

Awards

  • Co-Chair, World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Generative Biology
  • National Research Foundation of Singapore's Investigatorship Award
  • NUHS-Mochtar Riady Pinnacle Research Excellence Award
  • Presidential Award from the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies
  • Scientific and Technological Achievement Award, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for "Advancing the Agency's Antimicrobial Testing Program Abilities to Genomic Investigation of Microbial Pathogens"