Steve Evans | Senior Technical Fellow
Steve Evans is a Senior Technical Fellow at BioMADE and served as its Interim Chief Technology Officer. His career spanned 30 years bringing biotechnology products from the lab to the field in small and large companies, contributing to the discovery, development and commercialization pipelines. At Mycogen Corporation, he developed fermentation-produced microbial and recombinant biopesticides. He created novel process analytical tools to scale and manufacture recombinant biopesticides (100kL scale) and developed novel regulatory approaches for the EPA resulting in the first commercial path to environmental release of a class of engineered microbial pesticides. Within Dow AgroSciences, he transitioned to transgenic crop traits and created multiple protein expression pipelines to enable discovery (1-100 mg) and regulatory assessments (10-100 g). As part of the Advanced Technology Development team, he enabled a USDA license on animal vaccine production via fermentation-derived plant cell cultures expressing relevant antigens and enabled a computational and synthetic biology workflow for zinc finger nuclease designs for plant genome editing. He created an advanced analytical team focused on novel mass spectrometry and microscopy techniques to accelerate new product development.
He has ten years of experience in public-private partnerships focused on synthetic biology. He was Chair of the industrial advisory board of NSF-SynBERC, and continues to serve on the EBRC leadership team. He was Vice Chair of the BIO Organization’s synthetic biology working group. He served as a study member on the National Academies of Sciences Future Products of Biotechnology report and on the NAS Safeguarding the Bioeconomy report. He occupied industry leadership roles in two I/UCRCs. He contributed to NSF programs defining environmental release strategies for organisms produced by synthetic biology, was an Ad Hoc advisor to the UN CBD on-line forum on synthetic biology and digital sequence information, and is engaged domestically on ELSI analysis the DARPA Insect Allies Program. After leading technology roadmapping and horizon scanning efforts, he retired as a Fellow from Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva Agriscience) to found Re-Knowvate LLC. Since 2020, he actively participated in planning and executing the technical agenda for BioMADE. His passion is to reuse this historical knowledge today in organizations which drive 21st century biotechnology so that they may learn from the actions of the early pioneers in applied biotechnology, thus accelerating their ability to innovate and deploy new technologies to benefit our world.