Eric Steen, a bioengineering PhD holder from UC Berkeley, is the CEO and co-founder of Lygos, a company that focuses on using biotechnology to solve environmental, energy, ingredient, and chemical challenges. Before founding Lygos, Steen held several positions, including post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Energy/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and synthetic biologist/metabolic engineer at UC Berkeley.

Steen's expertise spans across natural product and pharmaceutical relevant compounds, metabolic engineering, bioengineering, and management of technology. He harnesses biological processes to convert low-cost sugar and other abundant substrates into high-value ingredients and chemicals, including Bio-Malonic(TM) acid, which impacts the coatings, resins, adhesives, polymers, cleaning, flavors, fragrances, perfumes, and pharmaceutical industries.

Steen studied bioengineering at Brown University, where he earned a BS degree, Purdue University, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco, where he received his first Ph.D. Later, he studied management of technology at UC Berkeley's Walter A. Haas School of Business.