Dr. Swartz obtained his BS in chemical engineering from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

After working two years for Union Oil Co. of California, he earned his M.S. in chemical engineering and D.Sc. in biochemical engineering at MIT. Following a scientific exchange visit to the U.S.S.R. and an initial research position at Eli Lilly and Co., he joined Genentech in 1981, where he served in both scientific and managerial positions related to protein pharmaceutical development for nearly 18 years.

In 1998, he moved to Stanford University as Professor of Chemical Engineering focusing on cell-free biology. In 1999, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and, in 2003, helped initiate Stanford’s new Department of Bioengineering. He was named the Leland T. Edwards Professor in the School of Engineering in 2006 and the James H. Clark Professor in 2009.

He is a founder of Sutro Biopharma, Inc., a publicly traded company dedicated to developing cell-free protein pharmaceutical technologies. Sutro currently has four products in clinical testing with several others in development by collaborators. Vaxgen, another publicly traded company, is a spinoff from Sutro. He also co-founded GreenLight Biosciences, now publicly traded, a cell-free metabolic engineering company focusing on low-cost nucleic acid production for agricultural and human health markets.

His research seeks to reproduce and direct complex metabolism in a cell-free environment with a focus on improved protein pharmaceutical production as well as producing protein-based nanoparticles as game-changing targeted delivery vehicles and vaccines. An emerging focus is the economical, carbon-negative production of commodity biochemicals.