Professor Patrick Cai (PC, Manchester) is Prof. in Synthetic Genomics and a world-leading expert in synthetic chromosomes, with a highly interdisciplinary research group. In 2017, Prof. Cai’s team published 7 research articles in the journal of Science and featured on its cover. PC is the international coordinator for the (Sc2.0) Consortium, which is composed of over 10 top universities from 4 continents aiming to synthesize the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome. PC founded Edinburgh Genome Foundry, which is the largest automated DNA synthesis and assembly facility in academia today. PC regularly provides advice and consultancies to the Cabinet office, the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technologies. PC holds prestigious visiting professorships with MIT (US), MRC LMB at Cambridge (UK), Hong Kong University and Chinese Academy of Sciences (China). In 2022, PC was awarded a five-year EPSRC fellowship to work on biosecurity and biosafety mechanisms for synthetic genomes. In 2023, PC was awarded an ERC Consolidator Award to engineer non-coding RNAs using a synthetic genomics approach.