Malaria is a disease common to tropical and subtropical regions throughout the world that kills more than one million people per year, mostly children. Malarial infection is caused by strains of Plasmodium falciparum and related species, many of which have become resistant to prior, low-cost, chloroquine drug based treatments, greatly hampering control of the disease. The sesquiterpenoid artemisinin is an anti-malarial agent that is highly effective against drug resistant Plasmodium strains and is a key component of Artemisinin Based Combination Therapies (ACTs) now endorsed as the frontline therapy to treat the disease; however, artemisinin is seasonal, of variable quality, and can be in short supply, making ACTs unaffordable or unavailable to those most affected by the disease. Synthesis of artemisinin from microbially derived artemisinic acid (direct precursor of artemisinin) is an attractive low-cost alternative to extraction from plant material or total chemical synthesis. Semi-synthesis could supplement the global supply of artemisinin, reducing costs and making ACTs more widely available. Here we report on the development of fed-batch fermentation processes for the microbial production of artemisinic acid, using engineered strains of Escherichia coli. Several different approaches were used to express the heterologous genes for artemisinic acid biosynthesis and an effective fermentation strategy was identified by varying feed profiles, temperature, and induction timing. The accumulation of biosynthetic pathway intermediates prior to artemisinic acid was monitored to determine production bottlenecks.  The fermentation process parameters and media were improved resulting in a high-cell density, high-titer artemisinic acid production process.