VCU Engineering Ph.D. Candidate Earns Prestigious Fellowship

By Tom Gresham

George H. McArthur IV, a doctoral candidate in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering, has received the Whitaker International Fellowship to conduct research at Imperial College London starting this fall.

The fellowship will allow McArthur, who studies chemical engineering at VCU, to undertake a self-designed, yearlong bioengineering research project in the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London. Over the course of a year, McArthur will work on optimizing the engineered microbial production of Taxol, an anticancer chemical therapeutic. After completing his fellowship, he will return to VCU to finish his dissertation research in the laboratory of Stephen Fong, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering.

Fong said McArthur is a worthy recipient of the Whitaker International Fellowship.

“George possesses an extraordinary capacity to assimilate scientific knowledge through reading and conversations and to apply this knowledge to develop novel ideas,” Fong said. “The time George will spend at the Imperial College of London will provide him with additional breadth to his training and a valuable research collaborator for future endeavors. I expect that this international experience, combined with George’s natural scientific creativity, will lead to significant scientific advances in George’s research area of synthetic biology.”

McArthur’s research goals at VCU convolve quantitative, fundamental biology with chemical engineering principles. He is interested in building novel biological systems in order to elucidate biological design principles useful for understanding natural biology and learning to engineer biology for purpose-driven applications. His dissertation research at VCU is focused on developing genetic tools for controlling gene expression at the level of transcription and applying these tools to engineer bacteria for efficient chemical production from inexpensive raw materials.

McArthur attended Turner Ashby High School in Bridgewater, Va., and received bachelor’s degrees in music and chemical engineering with a minor in biology at the University of Virginia. After finishing his Ph.D. studies at VCU, McArthur plans to pursue pioneering postdoctoral research in a leading lab. He hopes to contribute toward the advancement of programmable genetics for applications in areas as diverse as metabolic engineering, regenerative medicine, neurobiology and perhaps even winemaking, one of his hobbies.

The Whitaker International Fellows and Scholars Program sends emerging leaders in U.S. biomedical engineering abroad to conduct a self-designed project that will enhance their own careers within the field. In the first five years of the Whitaker Program, 140 grants have been awarded to fellows and scholars to conduct projects in over 25 countries worldwide.