Switch Bioworks Appoints New Leadership to Scale Microbial Fertilizer

Djordjevic will oversee the company's entire R&D organization, tasked with moving the product pipeline from laboratory environments through greenhouse and field testing. Her background includes leadership roles at Perfect Day, where she managed strain engineering and fermentation, as well as stints at Zymergen and Synthetic Genomics. She is expected to refine the firm's regulatory and intellectual property strategies while scaling the internal multidisciplinary team.

Eric Bartels joins the advisory board to guide corporate strategy and commercial partnerships. His career spans over three decades in agricultural biologicals, including senior roles at Syngenta and Indigo, where he managed the full lifecycle of biological products from discovery to revenue generation. He currently advises McKinsey and various federal innovation agencies.

The company’s core technology, originally developed at Stanford University, centers on microbes that fix nitrogen directly on plant roots. By utilizing a genetic-switch mechanism, these microbes activate production only when needed, offering a potential alternative to the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process. Switch Bioworks currently holds seven patent families covering this technology and is actively testing its performance on corn crops under real-world conditions to validate the platform's viability beyond the laboratory.