Jason Kelly is Co-Founder and CEO at Ginkgo Bioworks, the leading platform for cell programming that engineers organisms for industries including pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food, and industrial biotech.

Jason earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biology and a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT, where his research helped catalyze the modern field of synthetic biology.

Jason served as Former Chair of the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology and co-founded Joyn Bio, a joint venture with Bayer focused on sustainable agriculture.

Ginkgo raised over 796M in venture capital before going public via SPAC merger in 2021 at a 15B valuation and was the first biotech company to join Y Combinator in 2014.

Under Jason's leadership, Ginkgo has built automated foundries that dramatically reduce the time and cost of organism engineering, democratizing bioengineering capabilities and expanding synthetic biology applications across multiple industries.