Tim Donohue is the Director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and the Interim Director of the Wisconsin Energy Institute.
His lab analyzes pathways and networks that microbes use to grow, generate biomass, or produce alternative fuels from sunlight or other renewable sources of energy. Donohue’s research group is studying metabolic and regulatory pathways of the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. The long range goals are to identify metabolic and regulatory activities that are critical to bioenergy formation, to obtain a thorough understanding of energy-conserving pathways of agricultural, environmental and medical importance, and to use computational models to help design microbial machines with increased capacity to utilize solar energy, generate renewable sources of energy, remove toxic compounds, or synthesize biodegradable polymers.