Meet John Ngo, Winner of the 2025 ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award

ACS Synthetic Biology, in partnership with The American Institute of Chemical Engineers, is proud to announce Professor John Ngo, Boston University, United States, as the winner of the 2025 ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award.

This award recognizes an outstanding early career investigator conducting research in any area of synthetic biology. Prof. Ngo will be honored during the 2025 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) meeting June 23 – 26, 2025, in Houston, Texas.

John Ngo is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and a member of the university’s Biological Design Center, which focuses on unlocking the design logic of life across its many scales. Ngo’s lab focuses on developing new technologies to both understand and engineer living systems, with applications ranging from the design of therapeutic proteins and RNAs to new strategies for programming and controlling therapeutic cells.

Current projects explore how cells sense and respond to their environments—especially through mechanical forces exchanged at cell-cell junctions—and how those external cues affect intracellular changes in transcription, translation, and protein activities. His group is also building new tools to visualize single molecules and track Central Dogma processes in cells and tissues in real time.

In 2024, Prof. Ngo served as Co-Chair of the International Mammalian Synthetic Biology Workshop (mSBW) held in Boston, MA. His students have earned multiple recognitions and honors, including the Biomedical Engineering Thesis of the Year Award and the College of Engineering’s Earle and Mildred Bailey Memorial Award, among others.

Read the Interview With Prof. Ngo

How would you describe your research to someone outside your field?

To someone far outside the field, I’d put it this way: if you think of your phone as a device, it has buttons to turn it on, sensors to detect your finger swipes, and pixels that light up the display. I make those kinds of parts—but for cells instead of phones.

For someone a bit closer to biology, I’d say I’m a “molecular engineer” who builds tools to help us better understand and reprogram the squishy, DNA-encoded devices we call cells.

And for those within the field: we design and apply new biomolecules to image and control cells, with a particular focus on how they communicate through mechanical forces and direct cell-cell contacts.

What inspired you to pursue your area of research?

I’m not sure I can point to a single source of inspiration, but there are a few recurring patterns in how I’ve found—and become obsessed with—new research directions.

One way is through encountering something so fascinating about life that I can’t stop thinking about it. When I was a kid, for example, my class had a pet hermit crab. We learned that these little creatures make their homes by finding seashells. That was cool, but what really blew my mind was discovering that some animals, like abalones, can grow their own shells. How does an animal grow a rock-like structure outside its body? Years later, I ended up working in a research lab studying that exact phenomenon—biomineralization—where proteins secreted by the abalone transform calcium carbonate into minerals like aragonite and calcite.

The other route to obsession is less scenic but just as real: persistence. That same undergraduate research experience came not only from curiosity but also from spending time reaching out to researchers and professors, trying to understand what they are looking for in potential recruits, and also some luck in timing. I think that’s how it often goes—you stumble across something interesting (whether seashells or science), and if it sparks something in you, you find a way to keep following it.

What do you think is the biggest challenge currently in your area of research?

In recent decades, there’s been a growing push for biological research to focus more directly on human health. That’s understandable—it’s accelerated our understanding of disease and driven new therapies. But in narrowing our scope, we risk overlooking a vast world of revolutionary molecular components and natural circuitry, much of it still undiscovered in oceans and ecosystems around the globe.

Many of the most impactful tools in synthetic biology—like GFP, Cas9, channelrhodopsin, or Taq polymerase—were found not through targeted medical research, but by exploring the diversity of life. So a key challenge for synthetic biology moving forward is to widen the aperture and expand the sources from which we draw our parts, ideas, and inspiration.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the field?

Looking back, I’ve had my fair share of failures: rejected grants, missed opportunities, “not this time” emails. So my advice comes in two parts. First, find what you love—and love what you do. Second, identify your guiding principles.

Being a scientist isn’t always easy. There will be hard days, setbacks, and moments when everything feels like it’s working against you. You will make mistakes. That’s inevitable. But don’t let your mistakes define you. It’s how you recover that makes the difference—how you learn, adapt, and keep going. Resilience is just as important as curiosity or creativity in this work.

In those tougher times, I like to come back to something my PhD advisor once told me—a message I’ve carried with me, especially since starting my lab: “Science, more than any other discipline, has the greatest potential to improve the quality of human life.” That perspective helps me stay grounded. Even when the path is challenging, what we do matters—and it has the power to make a real, positive impact in the world.