Being highly interdisciplinary, it includes bioorganic and medical chemistry, structural biology, biophysics and molecular biotechnology as well as metabolic and biomaterial engineering.

[3] He was appointed as full professor of biocatalysis at the TU Berlin in 2010[4] until the end of 2018, when he accepted the Tier 1 CRC position in Chemical Synthetic Biology at the University of Manitoba.

[28] In 2015, the team led by Ned Budisa reported the successful completion of a long-term evolution experiment that resulted in full, proteome-wide substitution of all 20,899 tryptophan residues with thienopyrrole-alanine in the genetic code of the bacterium Escherichia coli.

[30] At the same time, this approach might be an interesting biosafety technology to evolve biocontained synthetic cells[31] equipped with a "genetic firewall" which prevents their survival outside of man-made unnatural environments.

[32] Similar experiments with fluorinated tryptophan analogs[33] as xenobiotic compounds (in collaboration with Beate Koksch from the Free University of Berlin) has led to the discovery of exceptional physiological plasticity in microbial cultures during adaptive laboratory evolution, making them potential environmentally friendly tools for new bioremediation strategies.

Ned Budisa is also actively involved in the debate of possible societal, ethical and philosophical impacts of radical genetic code engineering in the context of synthetic cells and life as well as technologies derived thereof.