Rate My Professor Alexander Darlington

Dr. Alexander Darlington is an Associate Professor in Control and Engineering Biology in the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, where he holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship. He earned a PhD in Engineering from the University of Warwick in 2018, an MSci in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2015, and completed postgraduate training in Synthetic Biology at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick in 2015. His career appointments include Assistant Professor in Control and Engineering Biology at the University of Warwick since 2023, BBSRC Innovation Fellow with Ingenza Ltd. in 2020, and Postdoctoral Research Associate with Professor Declan Bates at the University of Warwick from 2018 to 2021.

Darlington specializes in synthetic biology and microbial biotechnology, developing quantitative mathematical models that integrate metabolism, gene expression, and microbial growth to overcome dynamic constraints and optimize the engineering of biological systems. He focuses on control strategies for balancing growth and production in engineered gene circuits and metabolic pathways, extending these to industrially relevant strains. Key awards include the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship (2021-2026, £715,000) for "Overcoming cellular constraints for real-world engineering of biological systems" and the BBSRC Innovation Fellowship (2020). Notable publications comprise "Design principles for engineering bacteria to maximise chemical production from batch cultures" (Nature Communications, 2024), "Designing biological network motif-based controllers by reverse engineering Hill function-type models from linear models" (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2025), and a study on growth and ribosome biogenesis (ACS Synthetic Biology, 2025). He leads grants such as the UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Award "Optimal cell factories for membrane protein production" (£1.8 million, 2024-2026), EPSRC "Parameter identification with optimal experimental design for engineering biology" (£205,000, 2024-2026), and contributes to the BBSRC/NSF CIRCLE centre (£2.3 million UK arm, 2025-2030). Darlington teaches modules including ES2C1: Introduction to Biomedical and Clinical Engineering and ES97J: Biological Systems: Analysis, Dynamics and Control, supervises theses, presents at conferences like CDC2024, Synthetic Biology UK, and IFAC World Congress, and is a member of the IEEE, Biochemical Society, and International Metabolic Engineering Society.