Speaker: Scott Coyle, Biochemistry
Description: All living things are made of “cells” — but what exactly is a cell, and what can we learn from them? In this talk, I will discuss how and why cells are the basic structural and functional units of all life on earth. We will then re-imagine the idea of the cell from completely different vantage points: as a chemical computer, as a manufacturing plant, or even as a microscopic robot we can reprogram from the ground up. By viewing living systems as “technology” as opposed to just “biology”, we will explore how cells might serve as the foundation for a new biologically-powered future.
Bio: Scott Coyle did his undergraduate training with Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Wendell Lim at the University of California San Francisco, where his research at the intersection of biochemistry, signaling, and evolution was recognized with a Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. He was a founding scientist at the successful immune-cell engineering startup CellDesignLabs, before doing post-doctoral work as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow with Manu Prakash at Stanford University. His own group uses synthetic biology to develop biochemical programming interfaces that expand our ability to understand and engineer dynamic cell biology, with a major focus on novel synthetic circuits that self-organize molecules in space and time. He is the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and is a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow.
More to Explore: http://coylelab.org/