Kevin Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware (UD) in Newark, Delaware, USA in the Philadelphia metro area. At UD, the Solomon lab develops tools to genetically manipulate anaerobic fungi and other environmental microbes for biomanufacturing and bioenergy.

Prior to setting up his own lab, Kevin trained under Michelle O’Malley (UCSB) and Mike Theodorou (Harper Adams University) to isolate, sequence, and analyze the genomes and transcriptomes of several anaerobic fungi, which have been published in Science and Nature Microbiology as well as other journals.

Currently, Kevin’s lab is prototyping a growing toolbox of reporter proteins, cellular localization tags, and gene regulatory elements to target protein expression to specific compartments within anaerobic fungi. This work is partially powered by the first chromosomally resolved anaerobic fungal genome, which was developed in his lab in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute and Phase Genomics (available at Mycocosm). Kevin’s lab also studies how anaerobic fungi detect and adapt to the lignin composition of diverse feedstocks in order to inform future engineering strategies.

Kevin SolomonImage credit: Sally Ryan

Kevin was awarded a US Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award in 2019, a National Science Foundation Early Faculty CAREER Award in 2022, and has provided congressional testimony to the US House of Representatives about the development of the bioeconomy. His research program is supported by federal funding from the DOE, National Science Foundation, the US Department of Agriculture, the National Institute of General Medical Science, private foundations, and industry.