Sean Sleight is a scientist, brewer, and musician living in Seattle, WA.  He currently works as a scientist and DNA wrangler at a Seattle biotech company where he uses robots to assemble DNA.  Before that he ran Sleight Beer Lab to help people make great beer using microbiology and molecular biology methods for quality control testing, and hunted down unique yeast strains that were used in Seattle breweries.  From 2013-2017 he was a strain engineer and manager in the synthetic biology group at an algae biofuels company in Seattle.  Sean did his postdoc work in the Bioengineering Dept. at the University of Washington identifying better ways to construct evolutionarily robust genetic circuits and developing DNA assembly methods for synthetic biology.  He received his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Michigan State University in 2007 (winning a Duvall Award for research on evolving freezing tolerance in E. coli) and B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from University of Arizona in 1999. He also makes music in his spare time, much of which is influenced by science and technology, including an album inspired by bacteria with high mutation rates and a synthetic biology trilogy created in collaboration with art/science high school students from Minnesota (album 1, 2, 3). He is the author of 11 first author publications, was an advisor for the University of Washington iGEM team, and continues to be an avid homebrewer.

Some random photos over the years…