Trey Sato oversees research projects aimed at better understanding the molecular bottlenecks in the production of biofuels by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. His approaches to addressing these problems include metabolic engineering to increase the flux of glucose and xylose from plant feedstocks to fermentative products such as ethanol and isobutanol. He also collaborates with other Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) labs to identify molecular mechanisms of microbial stress tolerance by chemical genomics approaches. Sato also oversees the operations of GLBRC’s Experimental Fermentation Lab with Yaoping Zhang.