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About

Nathan J. Hillson is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of synthetic biology, laboratory automation, and microfluidics, whose work has fundamentally advanced how biological systems are designed, constructed, and tested. Best known for his influential 2017 review on droplet microfluidics for synthetic biology (130 citations), Hillson has championed the use of miniaturized fluid systems to accelerate the engineering of genes and metabolic pathways. His development of the PaR-PaR Laboratory Automation Platform (2012, 61 citations) and the cross-platform PR-PR programming language (2014, 47 citations) transformed how robotic systems are integrated into biological workflows, making automation more accessible and standardized across laboratories worldwide. His ScanDrop platform (2014, 58 citations) demonstrated real-world impact by enabling rapid, cloud-connected detection of E. coli in drinking water. Hillson also created j5, a software tool for automating DNA assembly design, and his most recent work automates yeast strain construction within the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle. Collectively, his contributions span software, hardware, and experimental methodology, providing researchers with an integrated toolkit that dramatically compresses the timeline from biological concept to engineered organism.