Maureen McCann

Maureen McCann is Director of the Biosciences Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. She came to NREL from Purdue University where she was a Professor of Biological Sciences, Director of Purdue’s NEPTUNE Center for Power and Energy, funded by the Office of Naval Research, and Director of Purdue’s Energy Center. Maureen also served as the Director of the Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue, she was a project leader at the John Innes Centre Norwich, U.K., a government-funded research institute for plant and microbial sciences, funded by The Royal Society with a University Research Fellowship. She received her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her lab explores synthetic biology and genetic engineering approaches to optimize cell wall and biomass structure for conversion processes to fuels, chemicals, and materials.