Dr. Henry H. Lee is CEO & co-founder of Cultivarium, a non-profit bioengineering firm accelerating the pace of engineering environmental bacteria, archaea and fungi so their unique physiologies can be used for food, fuels, materials and medicine. Backed by The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Cultivarium has already reduced the time and cost of engineering new-to-lab microbes by more than ten-fold, and is building toolkits for more than 300 species—from halophiles that thrive in brine to filamentous fungi poised to reinvent biomanufacturing. Henry’s passion for microbial “dark matter” is grounded in 16 years of molecular-technology immersion. He has a background in electrical engineering and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University (with Jim Collins). While training as postdoctoral fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School (in George Church’s lab), he domesticated the ultrafast growing bacterium Vibrio natriegens and pioneered enzymatic DNA-synthesis methods now enabling DNA data storage. He has co-founded three startups, authored eight issued or pending patents, and co-chairs BioMade strain engineering committee. At Cultivarium, Henry combines biology, software and hardware to convert obscure microbes into reliable chassis. By bridging academic discovery and industrial deployment, he aims to make selecting the “right microbe for the job” as routine as choosing a software library. At SynBioBeta 2025 he is assembling the ecosystem that can turn today’s esoteric non-model microbes into tomorrow’s bio-industries.