John Blazeck

John Blazeck

Dr. John Blazeck grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before attending the University of Florida. At UF, he studied chemical engineering and worked with Dr. Kirk Ziegler as an undergraduate research assistant. John graduated summa cum laude from UF in 2007. After completing his undergraduate studies, John attained a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, preforming research with Dr. Hal Alper to engineer microbial hosts to produce biofuels. John continued his research career as a Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin, working with Dr. George Georgiou to engineer a cancer-fighting enzyme, which will soon be tested in clinical trials. John is now a new Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches Chemical Engineering courses and leads a laboratory of 14 graduate and undergraduate students. His laboratory’s current work aims to understand the complex interplay between metabolism and immune function in human cancers to be able to design new therapies. John’s work has resulted in 15 publications and 5 patents, and John has been recognized nationally with several prestigious awards and honors, including and American Cancer Society Fellowship, a National Merit Scholarship, and more recently, an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Beckman Young Investigator Award, a yearly honor given to promising new professors in the biological and chemical sciences. John now lives in Atlanta with his wonderful wife Kristina, and their three young children.