Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Jamey D. Young has been named Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering. Cornelius Vanderbilt Chairs are established by the university at all Vanderbilt schools to recognize faculty who are engaged in groundbreaking research.
Young is the director of graduate studies in chemical engineering and director of the Interdisciplinary Training in Engineering and Diabetes (ITED) T32 program. The overall goal of his research is to develop novel approaches to measure, understand, and control cellular metabolism.
Young’s lab developed the first publicly available software package—INCA, or Isotopomer Network Compartmental Analysis—that enables researchers to model data from metabolic tracer studies and quantify the flow of labeled atoms inside living cells. The information provided by INCA can help to better understand metabolic diseases or improve the productivity of cell-based bioprocesses. INCA has been licensed more than 1000 times for academic use and by a dozen biotechnology companies.
Young was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2010 and the DOE Early Career Award in 2012. He was named a Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow in 2017 and received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the ChBE department in 2018.
Young has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters describing the application of metabolic modeling and flux analysis to investigate research questions of relevance to medicine and biomanufacturing. He is a co-founder of Metalytics, Inc. and is on the Editorial Board of Current Opinion in Biotechnology.
He received a B.S. degree from the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from Purdue University, both in Chemical Engineering. Young joined Vanderbilt in 2008 from MIT, where he was an NIH Ruth Kirschstein Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Young received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Kentucky in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 2005, where he was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
The Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair was established in 2002 to recognize outstanding full professors already at Vanderbilt. The chair is named for the university’s founder, steamboat and railroad entrepreneur Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the university in 1873 with a gift of $1 million.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu