Michael Elowitz is the Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
He designed the Repressilator, a synthetic genetic oscillator that showed that new behaviors could be programmed in living cells, helping to spark the field of synthetic biology. He further showed that gene expression isintrinsically stochastic, or “noisy,” and revealed functional roles for noise in living cells. Elowitz is known for his “build to understand” approach, which uses synthetic biology to uncover biological design principles. He has applied this approach to uncover principles governing biological memory and intracellular computation, cell-fate control, cell-cell communication, and spatial patterning. His laboratory is currently engineering synthetic protein circuits that function as programmable therapeutics.
Elowitz is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a MacArthur Fellow.
Professional position
- Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology
