Melanie Tomczak is BioMADE’s Chief Technology Officer. Her scientific expertise is in biotechnology, biochemistry, biosensor development, protein structure-function relationships, and co-opting what nature does well. Melanie has expertise in building diverse technical teams to tackle complicated projects, bringing together everyone from basic field biologists to applied engineers to achieve program goals. She was a founding governing council member of the Nano Bio Manufacturing Consortium (NBMC) and served as Co-Chair of the Technical Working Group. She has been actively involved with NextFlex, especially in organizing the annual Innovation Days technical showcase and in expanding FlexFactor, their Education and Workforce Development program. She joined UES in 2004 as Research Scientist and Program Manager and was named Director of Biological and Nanoscale Technologies in 2010. During her tenure at UES, she grew the “bio group” from 5 to 95 employees through winning competitive Air Force Research Laboratory on-site contracts repeatedly as well as being awarded 15+ Small Business Innovation Research grants from agencies including NIH, USDA, EPA, DTRA, DARPA and Army. Prior to joining UES, Dr. Tomczak was a postdoctoral fellow in Biochemistry at Queen’s University, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of California – Davis, where she was an NSF-sponsored Plant Cell Biology Trainee, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was both a Hugh Morrison Scholar and a Jonathan Baldwin Turner Scholar.