Dr. Jiann-Shin Chen serves as a member of the SAB, and is a Professor of Biochemistry at Virginia Tech where he focuses on the metabolic activities that give an anaerobe a potentially useful trait, the molecular properties of enzymes, their structural genes, and the control elements for these genes. His team also studies gross properties of anaerobes as related to the molecular characterization, and is currently focused on solvent production and nitrogen fixation in clostridia.