Fei Wen
Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering
University of Michigan
United States of America
Biography
Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PhD Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering ’10 MS CHE ’06 Tsinghua University, Beijing, China BS ’03 Positions Held at U-M: Dow Corning Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, 2014-2016 Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering Department (2012-present) Positions Held Elsewhere: Postdoctoral Research, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University (2010-2012) Courses Taught: ChE 342 – Mass and Heat Transfer ChE460 Chemical Engineering Laboratory II ChE496/696 Industrial & Therapeutic Biomolecular Engineering
Research Interest
Understanding, monitoring, and modulating T cell function. T cells play pivotal roles in human adaptive immune response and have been implicated in a wide array of diseases, such as autoimmunity, allergy, cancer, and infectious diseases, as well as vaccine design and evaluation. The research goal is to harness the immunological power of T cells to fight cancer and infections and to control their undesired behaviors associated with autoimmunity and allergy. To achieve this goal, my group focuses on developing molecular engineering tools, such as protein-based nanoparticles, multiplexed T cell functional marker biosensor, and synthetic gene/antigen delivery viral particles. Producing sustainable biofuels using engineered microbes. My group is also interested in engineering microbes that are capable of converting lignocellulosic biomass to alternative biofuels, such as ethanol. The focus here is biomass-degrading enzyme activity engineering with the aim of identifying protein mutants that could break down biomass efficiently. Meanwhile, microbial metabolic engineering is employed with the aim of improving the biofuel yield and titer.
Publications
-
Hui Gao, In-Won Kim, Joon-Ho Choi, Eshita Khera, Fei Wen*, Jung-Kul Lee*. “Repeated production of L-xylulose by an immobilized whole-cell biocatalyst harboring L-arabinitol dehydrogenase coupled with an NAD+ regeneration systemâ€. Biochemical Engineering Journal. 2015, 96:23-28,
-
Fei Wen and Eshita Khera. “IDENTIFY-SOLVE-BROADCAST YOUR OWN TRANSPORT PHENOMENON: Student-Created YouTube Videos to Foster Active Learning in Mass and Heat Transferâ€. Chemical Engineering Education, 2016, Vol. 50, No. 3.
-
Hui Gao, Tae-Su Kim, Primata Mardina, Pengji Zhou, Fei Wen and Jung-Kul Lee. Rare sugar production by coupling of NADH oxidase and L-arabinitol dehydrogenase. RSC Advances, 2016, 6, 66609-66616.
-
Brett D. Hill, Andrew Zak, Eshita Khera, Fei Wen. Engineering Virus-like Particles for Antigen and Drug Delivery, Current Protein & Peptide Science, 2016 (in press).
-
Ming Huang, Wenjun Huang, Fei Wen, and Ronald G. Larson. Estimation of Binding Free Energies between Peptides and an MHC Class II Molecule Using Course-Grained Molecular Dynamics with a Weighted Histogram Analysis Method. Journal of Computational Chemistry 2017, DOI: 10.1002/jcc.24845
