Microbial Fermentation Workshop: July 29-31, 2026
Join BioMADE for a deep dive into Microbial Fermentation! This interactive course is designed to equip you with the latest tools, techniques, and insights to accelerate your career in biomanufacturing. Register here!
Program Overview
This three-day workshop will help you master the fundamentals of bioreactor principles and bioprocess development through comprehensive training sessions led by experienced practitioners from leading companies in the field. You will:
Understand the biological principles behind microbial metabolism, growth, and genetic modification
Review the principles behind bioreactor design, operation, monitoring and control, and scale up
Learn how to improve fermentation performance through statistical design and analysis of experiments
Learn a structured approach to downstream bioprocess design
Learn how to carry out economic analysis of bioprocess operating and capital costs
Solve real-world, industrial fermentation problems through interactive exercises and case studies
Who should attend?
This workshop is intended for scientific, engineering, and business professionals with some prior fermentation-related experience.
Agenda
Microbial Growth, Metabolism, and GMOs for Bioprocesses
Medium Design and Microbe Cultivation
Bioprocess Design, Monitoring and Control
Material, Elemental, and Electron Balances
Oxygen Mass Transfer, Mixing and Power
Day 2: Bioreactor Principles & Fermentation Scale-Up
Sterilization and Aseptic Practices
Small Scale Fermentation Systems and Herbert-Pirt
Sterile Design Principles
Problems Encountered in Scale-Up
Bioprocess Development
Design of Experiments and Model Generation
Intro to Process Design
Bioprocess Simulation, TEA, and LCA
Featuring case studies on:
Scale-up Challenges
The Future of Fermentation
Downstream Processing
Rates
Three-day Microbial Fermentation Workshop:
Standard: $3,500
BioMADE members: $3,000
Educators: $2,450
Students: $8755
Combine with the two-day Metabolic Engineering Workshop and save $500!
Includes daily lunch, networking receptions, all curricula, hands-on activities, and more
Event Details
Location
University of San Diego
Pardee Legal Research Center (Room 132)
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110
Date and Time
Wednesday – Thursday: 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Friday: 8:00 am – 3:30 pm
Hotel Room Block
Fairfield by Marriott Inn & Suites San Diego Old Town
Newly renovated
Walking distance to Old Town restaurants and shops
10 minutes from campus
Book your discounted rate of $219 by June 26 (includes breakfast).
Instructors
Speakers are long-time industry professionals who will provide you with the fundamental knowledge and practical skills needed to design, develop, optimize, control, scale-up, analyze, and troubleshoot your fermentation processes. This course will be taught by:
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Jason Crater is an industrial biotechnology executive and bioprocess scale-up leader with more than 15 years of experience developing, scaling, and commercializing fermentation-based technologies across fuels, commodity chemicals, specialty chemicals, food, and emerging biomanufacturing applications. He currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer at Caladan Bio, where he leads platform development for next-generation, data-rich lab-scale bioreactors designed to accelerate fermentation and cell culture process development.
Over the course of his career, Jason has supported the development and commercialization of more than a dozen fermentation-derived products, spanning early-stage R&D, pilot development, process scale-up, commercial engineering, and plant start-up. His work has taken him across 40+ industrial facilities in more than 20 countries, giving him deep practical experience translating laboratory biology into robust, scalable, and economically viable manufacturing processes. Prior to Caladan, he spent over a decade in technical and leadership roles at Genomatica and Geltor, and later founded Altered Bio, an independent consultancy advising start-ups, scale-ups, and established companies across the industrial biotechnology ecosystem.
Jason holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University.
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Stefan is director of bioprocessing at Ohr Synbiosis Inc. Stefan has held various technical and project leadership roles in molecular biology, strain engineering and fermentation engineering at Amyris Inc, Zymergen Inc and Genomatica, and has a PhD in industrial microbiology from Delft University of Technology
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Tim Dodge has been a practicing fermentation engineer for over 40 years and is still at his first post-graduation job. Most of his career has been spent producing industrial enzymes. He has been directly involved in the introduction of >70 individual proteins that go into hundreds of different products. Walking through the grocery store and buying items that he helped make possible remains motivating to this day.
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Michael is a veteran of the industrial biotechnology sector leading development, scale-up, and commercialization of novel processes for the production of chemicals via fermentation. He has been with Genomatica since 2008 and currently leads their Process Technology & Engineering department. Prior to Genomatica, he held several R&D and operations positions at NatureWorks LLC.
Michael holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
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Harish has been at Geno since 2013 and currently serves as the Senior Director of Systems Bioengineering and Head of Cell Factory Development at Geno. Harish leads all disciplines associated with cell factory development including computational modeling, data science, strain engineering, synthetic biology and experimental systems biology platform for strain evaluation and physiological characterization. Harish is a recipient of the two EPA Green Chemistry awards for Geno’s bio-based butylene glycol process and Geno’s fatty alcohols process, and has been recognized by the National Academy of Engineering’s and selected as one of the Innovative Young Engineers in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2019 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
Harish holds a Bachelors in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India and a Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego.
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Pip Reeder PhD is a chemical engineer with over 15 years industry experience working in innovative startups across the industrial, agricultural, and pharmaceutical fields with a focus on microbial process development at the bench to pilot scales. Her resume includes Greenlight Biosciences, Vedanta, Robigo, and currently works at a stealth biotech startup with Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, MA.