Christian S. Diercks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research. He earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry from the Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg and did undergraduate in supramolecular chemistry with Nobel laureates Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir J. Fraser Stoddart at the CNRS in Strasbourg, and Northwestern University, respectively. He went on to pursue graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD in chemistry working with Nobel laureate Omar M. Yaghi on porous organic materials for electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide. For his dissertation work he was awarded the KAVLI Philomathia graduate student fellowship and the KAVLI ENSI thesis prize at UC Berkeley. After his PhD, Christian went on to do postdoctoral research in chemical and synthetic biology at Scripps Research working with Prof. Peter G. Schultz, where he developed a powerful system for continuous hypermutation and accelerated evolution in E. coli. In his independent career, Christian aims to apply this platform for the directed evolution of enzyme and protein therapeutics, and to extend the concepts for the Darwinian evolution of synthetic gene delivery vehicles.