Adam Bøtkjær
Co-Founder @ ROAScales · Biotech Student @ DTU
Copenhagen-based founder and biotech student — building growth systems at ROAScales, and finishing a bachelor’s in biotechnology at DTU.
Now
Apr 2026 — Present · Copenhagen
›Co-Founder & CEO, ROAScales — building growth systems.
ROAScales builds growth systems — the infrastructure and processes that let a business scale its acquisition without scaling its chaos. I co-founded it to apply the same systems-thinking I use in the lab to marketing and growth: find the actual bottleneck, then engineer around it.
Feb — Jun 2026 · BRIGHT, DTU
›Bachelor’s thesis — engineered yeast to grow 18–28% faster on alternative feedstocks.
My thesis, in the Yeast Metabolic Engineering group at BRIGHT (Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, DTU), supervised by Irina Borodina and Yuesheng Zhang, engineered the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica — a candidate for sustainable microbial protein — to grow better on waste-derived carbon sources (acetate, ethanol, mannitol) instead of conventional sugars. Awarded the top grade.
Using a CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit built in our lab (TUNEYALI), I screened the yeast’s regulatory genes for one that would help it process multiple feedstocks at once instead of one at a time. Knocking out a gene called POR1 did exactly that — a reproducible 18–28% faster growth rate while co-feeding on acetate and ethanol, with no cost to how it handled the third source. A small result on paper, but a genuine lead for more sustainable microbial protein production.
Wild-type (thin) vs. engineered strain (bold).
Education
2026 — 2028
DTU — MSc, Biotechnology (in progress)
Sep 2025 — Jan 2026
Shanghai Jiao Tong University — Exchange semester, School of Life Sciences & Biotechnology
—
DTU — BSc, Biotechnology