Julius Lucks

Julius B. Lucks is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Co-Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University. Lucks has made seminal contributions to our understanding of RNA by discovering RNA folding principles related to understanding and treating disease, and by developing new approaches to engineering RNA biotechnologies that tackle challenges in global health.

Lucks grew up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina before completing a BS in Chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill as a Goldwater Scholar, an M Phil in Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge University as a Churchill Scholar, a PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard as Hertz Fellow, and a Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley.

In addition to his research efforts, Lucks is leading the first NSF graduate training program in synthetic biology, is a founding member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, and co-founded the Cold Spring Harbor Synthetic Biology Summer Course. Lucks has received many recognitions for his research and teaching including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an NIH New Innovator Award, an NSF CAREER award, the ACS Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award, and a Camille-Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award among others.