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DTSTART;TZID="Pacific Time (US & Canada)":20260428T103000
DTEND;TZID="Pacific Time (US & Canada)":20260428T130000
SUMMARY:2026 ENSOR Lectureship: presented by Dr. James J. Collins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
LOCATION:Spark
DESCRIPTION:2026 Ensor Lectureship\n\nSPEAKER: Dr. James J. Collins, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\n\nBIOGRAPHY:\n\nJim Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his research group is currently focused on using synthetic biology to create next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics as well as programmable molecular tools for the life sciences. Collins is also the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT and co-founder of Phare Bio, a non-profit focused on AI-driven antibiotic discovery. Collins has received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Award, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, and the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, and he is an elected member of all three national academies - the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.\n\n \n\nABSTRACT:\n\nSynthetic biology is bringing together engineers, computer scientists and biologists to model, design and construct biological circuits out of proteins, genes and other bits of DNA, and to use these circuits to rewire and reprogram organisms. These re-engineered organisms are going to change our lives in the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, rapid diagnostic tests, and synthetic probiotics to treat infections and a range of complex diseases. In this talk, we highlight recent efforts to create synthetic gene circuits and programmable cells, and discuss a variety of synthetic biology applications in biotechnology and biomedicine. We also discuss recent studies that use generative AI in the context of synthetic biology to create novel classes of diagnostics, therapeutics, and programmable molecular tools for the life sciences.
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