Associate Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON
email: emma.master @ utoronto.ca
Emma Master earned a B.Sc. in Microbiology from McGill University in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Microbiology from UBC in 2002. In 2002, she joined the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden (KTH) as a Post-doctoral Fellow. There, she studied wood fibre biosynthesis and modification by carbohydrate-active enzymes and led the enzyme discovery and characterization group of KTH’s wood biotechnology division. In 2004, she joined the Fungal Genomics Project at Concordia University, before she became faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto in 2005.
Emma’s research program at the University of Toronto applies the specificity of enzyme catalyzed reactions, and the enormous potential to discover and engineer new enzyme activities, to enable the synthesis of high-value biopolymers and specialized biochemicals that provide renewable alternatives to petroleum-based compounds. She received a Finnish Distinguished Fellowship (FiDiPro) in 2010 and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation in 2009. She is project leader for “Forest FAB: Applied Genomics for Functionalized Fibre and Biochemicals”, a 4-year project funded by the Ontario Research Fund.
