Oliver Vining

Oliver Vining earned his BA in Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009, where he focused on natural product chemistry and pharmacology as a student in the College of Creative Studies. In 2014 he completed his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Oregon State University under the mentorship of Dr. Kerry McPhail, developing new techniques to identify and characterize active metabolites from marine microbes as therapeutic leads. He then transitioned to industry and spent nearly a decade designing high-throughput mass spectrometry, biological screening, and compound isolation workflows to increase efficiency in the drug discovery process. Dr. Vining joined ExFAB as a Project Scientist in 2024 where he co-manages the automated anaerobic biofoundry at UCSB and leads the center’s mass spectrometry programs to characterize and quantify microbial metabolic products.