Jason Chin completed his PhD at Yale University in 2001 as a Fullbright Awardee and undertook a subsequent three-year Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute. In 2003, he joined the LMB as a Group Leader, becoming Head of the Centre for Chemical and Synthetic Biology (CCSB) in 2010 and Joint Head of the PNAC Division in 2018 until his departure in 2025. Jason has also served as a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge, an Associate Faculty Member in Synthetic Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Biochemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Throughout his time at the LMB, Jason’s research focussed on developing foundational strategies to expand the genetic code of living organisms to increase and diversify the chemical building blocks that cells use to make proteins, and to explore strategies for the encoded cellular synthesis of non-canonical biopolymers. He is applying the strategies he has developed to provide diverse, new biological insights.
In 2022, whilst at the LMB, Jason’s pioneering work in synthetic biology research was commercialised and launched as Constructive.Bio. The company aims to re-engineer biology, creating new classes of enzymes, drugs and biomaterials.
Jason has been awarded numerous awards and prizes for his work including the 2009 Francis Crick Prize of the Royal Society, the 2010 Corday Morgan Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2010 EMBO Gold Medal, the 2011 Louis-Jeantet Young Investigator Career Award and the 2019 Sackler International Prize in Physical Sciences. He has also been inducted into the European Patent Office Inventors Hall of Fame, is a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2023, Jason was appointed as a non-executive member of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) Board.
In 2025, Jason departed the LMB to pursue a new role as Executive Director of the Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), Oxford.