Justin English

Justin grew up in Chittenango, NY -- a small rural farming town in the 'upstate' portion of New York State. He developed an early love for nature and biology during his mostly outdoors childhood, spurring him to earn his bachelor's in biology and genetics from the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 2007. Justin's undergraduate research work in yeast genetics during his time at Cornell kindled a love for genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

The year following his graduation from Cornell he worked as a post-baccalaureate researcher at the NCI in Bethesda Maryland before pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Justin joined the Department of Pharmacology at UNC, and earned his Ph.D. in yeast cell signaling research with Dr. Henrik Dohlman. During his Ph.D. he developed a scientific appreciation for the work of Dr. Bryan Roth in the same department and chose to pursue his postdoctoral training in the Roth lab in 2014. Justin used the freedom of his post-doctoral training period to develop a method for the directed evolution of proteins in mammalian cells in an effort to acquire control over the cell signaling systems he had labored to understand during his Ph.D. work. The result of that work is the platform Justin has now based his lab on here in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah.

Justin spends most of his time advising his amazing team of researchers and trainees. When he can sneak away to the bench he enjoys tinkering with new technology development ideas. Proof of concept data is the best way to convince someone to take a project and run with it!