Gregory Bontemps is a former process engineer at ABPDU. He is currently a bioprocess engineer at ZymoChem.
How did you become interested in biomanufacturing?
During my undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara, I was still figuring out exactly what I wanted to do in my career. As a chemical engineering major, I was working in a lab that was at the intersection of materials and biology. I expected to be more interested in the materials side, but I ended up liking the biology aspect. Looking at biology from a chemical engineering perspective, the cell is a little factory and it’s kind of a black box. You’re mostly focused on the inputs and outputs and not really what’s going on at a deeper level. Once I learned more about all the things going on inside the cell, I thought that complexity was really interesting. That’s what led me to look into the field of biomanufacturing and apply to the ABPDU.
What was your experience like at ABPDU?
I joined ABPDU as a process engineer focused on fermentation and recovery. I was primarily working on industry collaboration projects. There was a lot to learn, first and foremost the equipment — how to operate them, and also how to apply different equipment to companies’ projects. Before ABPDU, I had seen most of the equipment only in textbooks. I was able to rely on my colleagues at ABPDU to teach me and get me pointed in the right direction. That’s the great thing about being at ABPDU, that everyone is so willing to help.
My position also gave me valuable experience in interacting with clients — how to understand what they know, what they need, and how to cater to their specific project. I was able to work on a diverse range of projects, from companies who were just starting out on their bioprocess, to companies who were working on tech transfer for scale up.
What did you do after ABPDU?
As I worked with more and more companies at ABPDU, I found myself wanting to delve deeper and look at every part of the bioprocess — from strain development and fermentation to downstream and recovery — to understand how everything works together. That was what led me to my current role as a bioprocess engineer at ZymoChem.
I joined ZymoChem as one of the only engineers at the time, working on both fermentation and downstream recovery. I’ve spent the last three years working on building a process from the ground up to get us to our first scalable process. At this point, I’m transitioning from process development to be more focused on scale up.
Obviously, working on just one project is much different than my work at ABPDU, where I was working on so many different kinds of processes and products. But the breadth of knowledge and problem-solving skills that I gained from that experience has been very useful in my current role.
I have actually been able to collaborate with ABPDU doing some work on fermentation and downstream processing for ZymoChem. It’s been fun coming back and working with a lot of my former colleagues.
What are your future career goals?
The next big step for me will be focusing on scale up. Seeing products come to fruition will be an interesting next phase. Past that, there’s the decision of whether I want to continue being on the scale up side or the process development side. I’m passionate about process development and I’ve found that I enjoy supporting people in that, but I also want to experience working on scale up. I think a lot of the companies working to scale up industrial biotechnologies are setting the stage to show that these technologies can actually be commercialized. Ideally, we’re going to get some good success stories out and we will be able to reinvigorate the field.