Dr Joanna Sadler

We had a lot of interest in our work on converting plastic waste into vanillin flavouring. The EPSRC IAA enabled me capitalise and kick-start a collaboration with a company interested in vanillin production. After this, the partner agreed to fund a postdoc for two years to continue developing the technology and evaluate it for commercialisation.

Joanna obtained an MSc in Chemistry from the University of Bristol in 2013 and a PhD in Biocatalysis and Organic Chemistry from GSK and the University of Strathclyde in 2017. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and the University of St Andrews, where she specialised in directed evolution and metabolic engineering. She moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2019 to take up a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship in the lab of Dr Stephen Wallace, and is now leading her independent research laboratory as a Chancellor’s Fellow.

Joanna’s career pathway has allowed her to pursue her interests in developing industrially relevant biotechnologies to improve the sustainability of the chemicals and plastics industries.

Her multi-disciplinary research combines synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry in novel technologies to degrade and upcycle post-consumer plastic waste. This includes enzyme discovery, pathway engineering and optimisation, and developing novel enzyme display methods. Her research aims to not only remove waste plastic from circulation, but also to enable sustainable routes to bulk and fine chemicals manufacture, which are otherwise derived directly from petrochemicals. 

With the support of the Chancellor’s Fellowship, she is looking forward to tackling the challenges of biosynthesis of a range of industrially useful molecules from C-rich waste materials, including end-of-life plastics.

Dr Sadler’s research group proved the feasibility of turning single-use PET drink bottles into vanillin using engineered E. coli bacteria as a catalyst and now the same process is being applied to assess the viability of recycling end-of-life sails for similar chemicals in collaboration with another industrial partner.

Dr Joanna Sadler said:

“We’re delighted to be part of this collaboration, which draws upon our expertise to test the viability of using a biological system to upcycle plastic fibres from sails into high-value chemicals. The results from our research have already had major implications for the field of plastic sustainability and demonstrates the power of engineering biology to address real-world challenges.”