Kimberly Kupiecki

Kimberly Kupiecki did not arrive in synthetic biology from a lab bench, and that is most of what makes her worth listening to. Kimberly trained as a chemical engineer at UC Berkeley, picked up an MBA, and then spent twenty years as the person standing between a hard technology and the market that needed to understand it, first building the clean-tech communications practice at Edelman back when clean tech was barely a phrase, then running strategic marketing at Dow Chemical, then leading global sustainability and ESG (the environmental, social and governance reporting that companies now live and die by) at DuPont. So when she sat down on the show as Ginkgo Bioworks' Senior Director of Business Development for Sustainability, she was doing the thing she has always done: taking something genuinely strange and making a risk-averse industry believe it could use it.

Kimberly Kupiecki described Ginkgo Bioworks with the cleanest line I have heard for it. Ginkgo, she said, is a synthetic-biology platform whose expertise is to program the ACGT of cells similar to how you would program the ones and zeros of a computer, except that here you are coding for atoms, not for knowledge. In practice that means an enormous automated lab, what Ginkgo calls a foundry, running high-throughput screening, which is a fancy way of saying it can run a massive number of biological tests in a short time and surface the rare outlier that turns out to be exactly the cell you were looking for. Kimberly called that ability to find the outlier part of the secret sauce, and the company even sells it on a success-based model, where for some services the customer only pays if Ginkgo hits the agreed technical milestone.

Kimberly Kupiecki's job was to find where that machine meets water, and her honest answer was that the water sector is cautious for good reasons but leaves real opportunity on the table. The first place is sensing: Ginkgo partnered with the Calgary company FREDsense in 2022 to build microbial biosensors, living cells engineered to react when they meet a specific contaminant such as selenium or PFAS (the forever chemicals the whole industry is now chasing). The second is bioaugmentation, which means adding engineered microbial colonies to do a job inside a wastewater process, like denitrification, and asking whether you can make that organism work harder, at a higher or lower pH, a higher or lower temperature, taking biology that already exists and making it better. As she put it, that framing feels less risky to a utility than ripping out what works, which is exactly the wedge a careful industry will accept.

Kimberly Kupiecki has since carried that thesis to a smaller company, Alchemyca Biotech, where as of 2025 she heads business development for digital, analytical and bioaugmentation solutions across waste, water and renewable energy, which is the Ginkgo water pitch now made her full-time job. The part of her that the data never captures is that she is also an author. Her book The Beautiful Mess: A Working Mom's Guide to Practicing Imperfection came out of the same instinct that runs through her career, the willingness to admit that you cannot do everything and to figure out, in her words, what to ignore. She tells a story about a new business president at Dow who walked into a tense board meeting and, almost offhand, said you would be shocked at the stuff I ignore, and she never forgot it, because if he could say that out loud, she figured she could learn to do it too. That is the same pragmatism she brings to selling a risk-averse industry on programming cells: start with what the customer is willing to try, and make it work.

“We can program the ACGT of cells similar to how you would program the ones and zeros of a computer. The difference is you're actually coding for atoms versus knowledge.”

Kimberly Kupiecki is, in short, the translator the water-meets-biotech story needed: an engineer who can hold the genetics, the customer's spreadsheet and the regulator's caution in the same conversation, which is why she keeps being the one sent to convince a careful industry to try living technology. You can hear the full conversation on the (don't) Waste Water episode below, or read where the wider story of water innovation is heading.