BIO’s Brent Erickson joins advisory board of Energy Biosciences Institute, $500 million BP-university research arm

In Washington, Brent Erickson, executive vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) Industrial and Environmental Section and a noted authority on bioenergy, has been appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee to the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI). The Energy Biosciences Institute is a collaboration between the University of California Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois, and BP, and was founded with a 10-year, $500-million grant from BP.

Dr.Steven Chu, former head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now Secretary of Energy, was instrumental in EBI’s establishment. The EBI currently supports approximately 50 research projects, involving 120 faculty as well as 200 students and post-doctoral candidates.

Erickson serves on the advisory board of the Northeast SunGrant Initiative and, since 2004, has been active in the Bioenergy/Agriculture Working Group of the Energy Future Coalition, an advocacy coalition funded by the United Nations Foundation. In 2005 he was named consulting editor of the journal Industrial Biotechnology.

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