Edward Eisenstein, Acting President

Edward Eisenstein, Ph.D. was appointed Acting President of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) on July 1, 2009. He will serve as the fourth and final President of UMBI.

Dr. Eisenstein obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Georgetown University in 1985, and spent four years in the Virus Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley as an NRSA postdoctoral fellow. He joined UMBI’s Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (CARB) as an Assistant Professor in 1989. His research interests have spanned many contemporary issues in biotechnology, including the development and application of molecular, biochemical and biophysical approaches to the study of control mechanisms of regulatory proteins and enzyme catalysis, protein expression, structural genomics, and intracellular protein folding promoted by chaperones. Recently Dr. Eisenstein’s laboratory has turned their attention to plants, investigating the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites of medicinal plants, allosteric motor proteins involved in plant disease resistance, and the design of enzymes to reprogram lignin biosynthesis to enable more effective and economical approaches for the production of biofuel from plant feedstocks. Dr. Eisenstein has published over 70 peer reviewed scientific papers in leading journals in his field, has spoken at scores of conferences and universities on his research, organized and chaired a number of national and international scientific meetings focused on proteins, their expression, and their interactions, and serves on a number of boards, associations and review panels for the State of Maryland, private and non-profit organizations, and federal research institutions.

From 1995 to 1999 Dr. Eisenstein served as Associate Director of CARB, working for the University’s partner, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as their Leader of the Structural Biology Group within the Biotechnology Division of the Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory. As Associate Director, he oversaw the NIST programs at CARB, developed programs involving high-precision measurement of proteins and their interactions, as well as critical databases and standards for the biotechnology sector. Additionally, he was responsible for the hiring of four new NIST investigators at CARB, raising the group to ten faculty members.

Dr. Eisenstein served as Acting, Interim and Director of CARB from 2000 to 2008. Under his tenure as CARB Director, programs flourished and evolved to include the development of global approaches using genomics and proteomics tools and applying them to pressing biological questions in pathobiology and health, agriculture, and energy and the environment. He was one of the principal architects of a major, $60M expansion of the UMBI facilities at Shady Grove that included the construction of CARB II, which was dedicated in September 2007. This remarkable 140,000 square foot building housed state-of-the-art laboratories in plant and insect transformation, molecular systems biology including proteomics and metabolomics capabilities, structural biology and even includes an optimal GMP biomanufacturing laboratory. This expansion enabled the integration of programs involving CARB scientists in the areas of structural biology, biophysics and computational biology with those from UMBI’s Center for Biosystems Research (CBR) in plant and insect science to provide for emerging issues in biotechnology and in the analysis of complex biological systems. Additionally, these new programs enabled CARB to provide training and development opportunities to small companies in the growing biomanufacturing sector.

A long-standing interest of Dr. Eisenstein is in educational issues involving young people. He was instrumental in developing an internship program for high school students of the Montgomery County Public School system, enabling over 100 trainees over the last six years to obtain intensive training in state-of-the-art approaches in modern biotechnology, enhancing their interest in science, and resulting in their placement in science and engineering programs at some of the best colleges in the country, including the University of Maryland. Recently, Dr. Eisenstein and several colleagues established the Rockville Science Center, a non-profit organization that, in partnership with the Mayor and Council of the City of Rockville, is committed to develop a facility that would house a vibrant science center that offers an educational forum for citizens of all ages to explore the wonders of science that underlie everyday life and that relates to the scientific community of the region. He served as President of the founding Board of Trustees.