Dr. Jenny Molloy

Dr. Jenny Molloy

Board Treasurer

Dr. Jenny Molloy is currently the Executive Director, Beneficial Bio Ltd, UK.  She has a passion for better understanding the challenges facing researchers in accessing biological research tools in low-resource settings especially in Africa and Latin America. In response, she has been striving to provide working solutions to these challenges by critically investigating existing innovative solutions and the potential for local, distributed manufacture of these tools to improve access and build capacity for biological research. The overall goal in her researches is to introduce the concept of open-source methodologies to biotechnology within the existing settings of innovation and bioeconomy policy agenda.

As a Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of Engineering and Biotechnology at University of Cambridge, Jenny is keen to establish the role and impact of open approaches to Intellectual Property for a Sustainable and Equitable BioEconomy. Accordingly, she has been helping in establishing community biolabs for local enzyme production into the public domain among other efforts in her drive to achieve her goal.

In October, 2020, Dr Molloy was one of the 24 council members appointed into the Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology. Her job in the council, includes capturing, synthesizing and disseminating knowledge and insights from the council’s discussions, whose long-term goal is to develop a narrative of the ideal future states of synthetic biology. She was the Synthetic Biology Coordinator at the University of Cambridge between 2015 and 2018. She is also the founder of a number of not-for-profit organizations such as the Global Open Science Hardware Community (GOSH), Beneficial Bio Ltd and the Cambridge Biomakespace. She boasts of several research projects, grants as well as publications to show for her efforts.

Dr Jenny Molly holds a PhD degree in Zoology from Oxford University and a BA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge