Jason is interested in diverse approaches to expand the functions of living matter.
In 2025 Jason became the Founding Director of the Generative Biology Institute at the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford, a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Oxford Chemistry and a fellow by special election at Magdalen College, Oxford. Prior to moving to Oxford Jason was at MRC-LMB, Cambridge, where he was a Programme Leader, & Head of the Protein & Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division. He also established and headed the Centre for Chemical and Synthetic Biology at MRC-LMB. Jason was a Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Damon Runyon Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute, obtained his PhD as a Fulbright grantee from Yale University, and was an undergraduate at Oxford University. Jason has pioneered approaches to reprogramming the genetic code of living organisms for the encoded synthesis of proteins containing non-canonical building blocks and the encoded synthesis of entirely non-canonical polymers. He has also pioneered methods for genome synthesis and demonstrated the total synthesis of a functional recoded E. coli genome. Jason’s work has been recognized by a number of awards, including: the Francis Crick Prize (Royal Society), the Corday Morgan Prize (Royal Society of Chemistry), European Molecular Biology Organization’s (EMBO) Gold Medal, Louis-Jeantet Young Investigator Career Award, Sackler International Prize in the Physical Science. He is in the European Inventors Hall of Fame, a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Fellow of The Royal Society. He holds an honorary doctorate from ETH, Zurich.
