Freeman Lan

Freeman Lan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Toronto, where he joined as a tenure-track faculty member in December 2023. His research focuses on developing and applying high-throughput experimental technologies to study and engineer the human gut microbiome. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and completed his Ph.D. through the joint Bioengineering program at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco, where he was advised by Adam Abate. His doctoral research centered on high-throughput biology and synthetic biology, with an emphasis on microfluidic technologies. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Ophelia Venturelli at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he combined in vitro culturing systems with computational models to analyze complex microbial communities. His work has been recognized with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Careers Award at the Scientific Interfaces and has resulted in multiple first-author publications in journals such as Nature Methods, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Communications, as well as several U.S. patents.