Sofie De Maeseneire is an expert in metabolic engineering of and tool development for yeasts and fungal hosts. She aims to generate microbial production platforms for specialty carbohydrates and biosurfactants. After obtaining her PhD on the development of a novel fungal host for enzyme production, her research focuses on the development of Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a platform for specialty sugars, on the development of non-conventional yeasts as a platforms for the production of biosurfactants and on the development of synthetic biology-based tools to enable metabolic engineering of new (eukaryotic) production hosts. Part of her research contributed to the foundation of the spin-off AmphiStar.