Nathan Crook

Nathan Crook, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at NC State University's College of Engineering. He leads the Crook Lab, which develops engineering approaches for biological systems, with particular focus on therapeutic applications of probiotic yeast.

His research focuses on:

• Engineering Saccharomyces boulardii yeast for therapeutic synthesis in the gastrointestinal tract
• Developing genetic toolkits for probiotic yeast engineering
• Characterizing colonization kinetics in mouse models
• Enhancing microbial peptide production and secretion
• Creating high-throughput screening methods including retrotransposon-mediated directed evolution
• Designing computational algorithms for transcriptional control in yeast

The ultimate goal is developing platform technologies to overcome bottlenecks in genetic engineering for improved drug delivery systems.

He collaborates with the Center for Gastrointestinal Biology and Disease (CGIBD) at UNC Chapel Hill, focusing on microbiome research, and works with collaborator Magness.