Author Photo by Jack at Headshots Raleigh.
George C. Engelmayr, Jr., PhD was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 25, 1974 and has been an avid reader and writer of fiction since childhood. George was raised in a loving, working-class household, where through campfire stories and uncanny, firsthand experiences he developed a fascination with all things paranormal, including the works of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and Anne Rice. Upon graduating from Souderton High School in 1992, George began his undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Penn State University. It was around this time when he first read Michael Crichton’s classic techno-thriller Jurassic Park, inspiring George to pursue a career in the biomedical sciences. Upon graduating from Penn State in 1997, George worked as an engineer and night shift supervisor at the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co., Inc. During this time, he completed a master’s degree in biotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania and began writing a novel-length manuscript, what would ultimately serve as an early precursor to his 2017 debut novel, Proof of the Existence. In 2001, George began his doctoral studies in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He worked under the guidance of Prof. Michael S. Sacks on designing tissue-engineered replacement heart valves for children suffering from congential heart disease. Upon earning his PhD in 2005, George moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where at MIT he conducted his postdoctoral research in cardiac muscle tissue engineering under the guidance of Dr. Lisa E. Freed and Prof. Robert Langer. George returned to Penn State in 2009 as an assistant professor of bioengineering, and in 2012 served as a research scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It was at Duke where George began working nights and weekends on Proof of the Existence. From 2013 to 2018, George led a research and development team at the vascular tissue-engineering company, Humacyte. In 2018, George moved to Berkeley, CA, where he worked on developing cell-based meat at Memphis Meats. Subsequently, he worked at VitroLabs, Inc., developing real leather from stem cells and renewable materials and served as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Mission Barns, developing cell-based meat. In December 2022, George founded Myodenovo Inc. in Durham, NC to bring to mass market the next generation of cultivated meats. Of note, George’s pen name, G.C. Engelmayr, is a nod to academic research, in which the authors of scientific papers are typically cited by their last names and initials.