2025 SIMB Board of Directors Election

SIMB Election Info

The 2025 SIMB Board of Directors Election will being on March 3, 2025 and will end on March, 31 2025 noon EDT. Members must join/renew by March 28, 2025 noon EDT to be eligible to vote. Voting instructions will be sent to members who are eligible to vote via email**. If a member has recently joined or renewed for 2025 once the election begins, voting instructions will be emailed. Once voting instructions have been received, the member will have access to the voting site.

Results will be published on the SIMB website and in SIMB News.

**student members are not eligible to vote

Candidates for President-Elect

Elisabeth Elder
Georgia Southwestern State University
Elisabeth D. (Betty) Elder has degrees from SMU, SFA, and Texas A&M. After being a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Texas A&M, she held academic positions at GSW, LSUA, and AU which resulted in teaching a broad spectrum of biology courses to undergraduate students as well as masters and doctoral students. She served as Department Chair of the Biology Department at GSW for 6 years.

Her research was primarily in applied and environmental microbiology with support from NSF, NIH, NASA, FDA, Crisp County Power, Flint River Commission, Huie Dellmon Trust Endowed Professorship, Roy and Vanita Martin Endowed Professorship, and the AU Undergraduate Research Program. In addition, she has experience in developing best practices in a food microbiology laboratory. Both the teaching and research activities were greatly supported by participating in SIMB which facilitated remaining current in microbiology and having productive interactions with SIMB members. Prior to, and continuing into her retirement, Betty has volunteered with classes at local grade schools with the last 10 years focused on science lessons for approximately 160 second graders per week.

Betty has been a member of SIMB for approximately 40 years. In addition to attending meetings, convening sessions, making presentations, and judging posters, her activities/honors in SIMB include:

• Secretary (four terms; 12 years)
• Finance Committee (12 years)
• Chair of the Education Committee (6 years)
• Editor-in-Chief of SIMB News (two terms; 10 years)
• Associate Editor of SIMB News (5 years and ongoing)
• Member of the Publications Committee (10 years)
• Chair of the Exhibits Committee (2 years)
• Chair of the Placement Committee (4 years and ongoing)
• Photographer (4 years and ongoing)
• Annual Meeting 5K Run Walk organizer (many years and ongoing)
• Waksman Award recipient (2006)
• Porter Award recipient (2013)
• SIMB Fellowship Status (2023)
• Quarter Century Club member

Should she be elected, her plans include:

• Revising the strategic plan and the core topics to facilitate the advancement of SIMB
• Continuing the mentorship program to support members’ careers
• Expanding collaborative interactions with other professional organizations
• Encouraging all members to participate in SIMB initiatives while conserving resources
• Continuing her support of the initiatives of the BOD, committees, and headquarters’ staff plus
• Providing institutional memory while being adaptable to the needs of the Society

Ben Shen
Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology
Ben Shen is Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Medicine and Director of the Natural Products Discovery Center (NPDC) at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology (2022-), and Professor in the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences at Scripps Research (2011-). Ben received B.S. from Hangzhou University, M.S. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. from Oregon State University and carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Before his current positions, Ben served on the faculty at the University of California, Davis (1995-2001), University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001-2010) where he held the Charles M. Johnson Distinguished Chair and served as the Principal Investigator of the NCI National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group for Cancers, and the Scripps Research Institute (2011-2022) where he served as the Vice Chair and Chair of Department of Chemistry, Florida Campus, and launched the NPDC, serving as its Director. Research in the Shen Lab centers on chemistry, biochemistry, and genetics of natural product biosynthesis and mining of actinobacterial genomes for natural products and drug discovery. Most recently, the Shen Lab launched the Actinobacterial Strain Collection and Genome Database web portal (https://npdc.rc.ufl.edu/home) as a Community Resource to promote and enable natural products training, research, and associated applications.

Ben has been a member of SIMB for the past 28 years, serving the Society in various capacities. Ben has presented at 16 SIM(B) annual meetings, co-chairing the natural products program for five of them, and presented at six SIM(B)-organized natural products meetings, serving as the program chair for two of them. Ben has served on the JIMB Editorial Board since 2002, as an Editor since 2017 and the Special Issue Editor since 2023. Most recently, Ben served one term on the SIMB Board of Directors (2021-24). Ben has been recognized by SIMB with the 2018 Charles Thom Award and by the American Society for Microbiology for the 2015 Promega Biotechnology Research Award. Ben is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Society of Pharmacognosy.

As SIMB President, Ben will focus on strengthening SIMB as the leading industrial microbiology and biotechnology society by promoting scientific excellence and technological innovation, fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration, facilitating networking and career development mentoring, and encouraging participation and building an inclusive community.

Candidates for Director

Carrie Eckert
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
“I am the Synthetic Biology Team Lead and Microbial Genetic Engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). I earned my PhD at the University of Colorado, Anschutz, followed by a postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Following my postdoc at NREL, I joined as research staff in 2011 and held a joint appointment at the University of Colorado, Boulder through the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute starting in 2013 where my research involved the study of a variety of model and non-model microbes relevant to industrial biotechnology. I have served as the Rapid Genetics team lead for the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI, a DOE funded Bioenergy Research Center) since 2017 and moved to ORNL in 2021 as the lead of the Synthetic Biology team of researchers developing genetic tools across a wide range of organisms. My research group continues to focus on the development and application of genetic tools for microbial metabolic engineering, with an emphasis on high throughput libraries utilizing CRISPR-Cas systems for functional genomics towards industrial application. I am most passionate about cross disciplinary and organizational (academic/ government/industry) collaborations to accelerate and drive scientific discovery to enable a vibrant bioeconomy.

SIMB is my “home” professional society. I have been attending and participating in SIMB conferences for over a decade as a speaker, session convener, and as part of the Program Committee for the Metabolic Engineering track (2023-Present). In 2021, I was co-chair for the Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals in 2022 in New Orleans, LA, the chair in 2023 in Portland, OR, and the past chair in 2024 in Alexandria, VA with Kevin Solomon at the helm. I am also active in the new SIMB mentorship program as well as other committees in the organization.

As a member of the Board of Directors, my goal is to work as a part of the team to ensure continued Society growth and success. I will advocate to continue SIMB’s promotion of both basic and applied science and growth of the industrial microbiology community by development and support of our next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. Specifically, I strive to foster and facilitate meaningful interactions between academia, government labs, and industry and to further increase industry involvement in SIMB. I will also continue to advocate for increased diversity in SIMB with a strong focus on early career membership ranging from undergraduate/ graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to early career scientists, expanding efforts towards mentorship, networking, and leadership opportunities to ensure they have the support they need to succeed and grow in their careers. SIMB is an important component to accelerating and advancing the emerging bioeconomy, and I would be honored to have the opportunity to serve this community.”

Andreas Schirmer
International Flavors & Fragrances
Andreas Schirmer is an Industrial Microbiologist. After graduating from the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School before he joined industry. He has worked in the Biotechnology Industry for 25 years. After initially working on polyketide natural products at Kosan Biosciences, he dedicated the majority of his industrial career to developing and advancing a microbial fatty acid platform for the production of sustainable fuels & chemicals. He and a small group of talented scientists in 2016 started up LS9, Inc, and then guided the fatty acid technology through two acquisitions (REG and Genomatica) towards a mature production platform. He is a prolific inventor (over 250 patents & patent applications worldwide) and motivated by guiding innovative science from ideation to commercialization. Recently, he joined IFF, International Flavors & Fragrances, to advance biotechnology in its scent division.

“I attended my first Annual SIMB Meeting in San Francisco in 2010, and it instantly became my favorite go-to conference. Since then, I have been an active member of the society. Between 2011 and 2017 I convened six sessions on fuels & chemicals and on microbiomes, which I enjoyed very much and which gave me the opportunity to meet many great people inside and outside of SIMB. From 2016- 2019, as a member of the Annual Program Committee for Metabolic Engineering, I helped to organize the annual meetings. Around that time, I noticed that corporate sponsorships at the SIMB meetings were lagging, so I volunteered to fundraise and contributed to revitalizing the SIMB Corporate Outreach/Affairs Committee, becoming its Co-chair from 2017-2020 and again in 2024.

I am still committed to Corporate Outreach because SIMB needs to be on a strong financial foundation to fulfill its mission, and industry has the capacity to help. As a member of the board of directors I intend to continue my outreach work and to increase industry participation. In addition, leveraging my long experience in Industrial Biotechnology, I would like to enable SIMB becoming a stronger vehicle and visionary of connecting industry, academia & government organizations. I believe close collaboration of these entities is necessary to solve the many challenges we face today to build a stronger and striving bioeconomy for the future

Kevin Solomon
University of Delaware
Kevin Solomon is an associate professor and a Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Career Development Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. After earning his PhD at MIT working with Kris Prather, and postdoctoral work with Michelle O’Malley at UCSB, his lab has focused on the development of nonmodel microbes for a circular bioeconomy with systems and synthetic biology approaches. Kevin’s group studies animal gut microbiomes for efficient microbial systems that degrade polymeric wastes and develops novel molecular tools to manipulate them. He has been recognized with multiple awards for research, teaching, and service including a US Department of Energy Early Career Award (2019), an NSF CAREER Award (2022), and the SIMB Early Career Award (2022). He serves on the editorial board of several journals including Synthetic & Systems Biotechnology, sits on the board of directors for the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, and has provided expert testimony before the 116th US House of Representatives on the convergence of engineering and biology.

Kevin has been an active member of SIMB since 2017. He regularly serves as session chair at the annual meeting and Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals (SBFC), served on the programming committee for the annual meeting in the environmental track, and recently convened the SBFC meeting in 2024 as the Programming Chair. Kevin continues to serve SIMB as the Past Chair for the 2025 SBFC meeting in Milwaukee later this year.

“What I love about SIMB is the community and tight collaboration between industry, academia, and government, and the opportunity it affords to accelerate the adoption of bench-scale science within the bioeconomy. As a Director, my goal would be to grow this partnership by integrating high-impact research topics of interest to all three constituencies into future meetings. This would be supported by an early career advisory board that would surface the needs of our community and foster future generations of SIMB leadership. Another goal would be to enhance the visibility of the society and actively recruit junior scientists with increased fundraising to support travel awards, and an increased social media presence across all platforms. I am also an advocate for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the society and would strive to increase international engagement by exploring partnerships with external industrial microbiology societies for joint programming opportunities. I am excited about the prospect of serving the SIMB community and working to ensure that it continues to serve as a premiere forum for catalyzing the development of the microbial bioeconomy.”