DrZoltan Kis

Zoltán Kis is a Professor of Bioprocess Engineering at the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, University of Sheffield and an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London.

Zoltán is leading the RNA Manufacturing Innovation Team (RNA MINT), a multidisciplinary group developing and digitalising platform technologies for RNA vaccine and therapeutic production. His work is addressing the challenges of producing large volumes of RNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, rapidly, at high quality and at low cost in a disease-agnostic manner.

He is regularly invited to speak at scientific and industry conferences, and to advise policy experts, non-governmental organisations and companies. For example, he was consulted for techno-economic modelling by the WHO mRNA Technology Transfer Hub, and he sits on the Sanofi mRNA CMC Advisory Board as well as the Pfizer mRNA technology Advisory Board.

Zoltán’s work on RNA vaccine manufacturing and production process modelling received high-profile media coverage in the UK and internationally e.g. on BBC World News, BBC Radio (4,5 and World Series), Sky News, RTL TV, China Central Television (CCTV), Nature News, The Lancet, BMJ, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times and many more.

Prior to joining the University of Sheffield, Zoltán was a Research Associate in the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub at the Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London. There he worked with Prof. Nilay Shah and Prof. Cleo Kontoravdi. The aim of this work was to develop vaccine manufacturing technologies capable of producing large amounts of vaccines against known and unknown pathogens, quickly, at high quality and low cost, in order to: (1) prevent epidemics and pandemics, and (2) meet changing immunization needs in low- and middle-income countries. 

Zoltán obtained his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Imperial College London, UK, holds an M.Sc. in Applied Biotechnology and a B.Eng. in Chemical with Biochemical Engineering.

Zoltán is open to providing consultancy in the following areas: RNA vaccine manufacturing, vaccine production process modelling, techno-economic assessment and modelling (aka. process-cost modelling), bioprocess modelling for QbD.