Mark Isalan did his PhD thesis engineering zinc fingers for joining new DNA sequences at the MRC LMB, University of Cambridge, UK, 1996-2000

This work was supervised by Prof. Sir Aaron Klug, OM, PRS (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982). He continued between 2000 and 2002 at Gendaq Ltd, UK (now owned by Sangamo Biosciences, Richmond CA). The work eventually contributed to the CompoZr zinc finger nucleases now commercially available from Sigma Aldrich. Between 2002 and 2006, Dr. Isalan received a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship to conduct research on artificial gene network engineering in Luis Serrano's group at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany. From 2006 to 2013 he was group leader at the EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit in Barcelona, ​​specialized in synthetic gene network engineering. He moved to Imperial College London in 2013 and continues to work on gene and protein network engineering, aiming to design biological systems that behave predictably and robustly, ultimately to develop new forms of gene therapy.