Cell mimicry: bottom-up engineering of life - POSTPONED

Joachim P Spatz joined the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in 2016 as Director. From 2004–2015 he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (former MPI for Metals Research). Since then he has also been a Full Professor at the University of Heidelberg and head of the Department of Biophysical Chemistry. He was an Associate Professor for Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg from 2000–2004. From 1999–2000 he received his habilitation in Physics at the University of Ulm. He was a PostDoc in the group of Professor Jacques Prost and Albrecht Ott at the Institut Curie, Paris, in 1997–1998. He received his Diploma in Physics (1994) and his PhD in Physics (1996) from the University of Ulm under the supervision of Professor Möller (founding Director of the Leibniz Institute of Interactive Materials in Aachen). He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among other awards, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation in 2017.

T-Y Dora Tang received her PhD from Imperial College London, UK, in 2010 in the area of membrane biophysics. After 1 year as an EPSRC knowledge transfer secondee at Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire, UK, she undertook a post-doc at the University of Bristol, UK, in the areas of origin of life and then synthetic biology. In 2016 she started her independent lab at the MPI-CBG, Dresden as part of the MaxSynBio consortium. Her research lies between biophysics, synthetic biology and materials chemistry with the goal of building minimal synthetic cellular systems as physical models to understand biological phenomena specifically those related to compartmentalisation.  

Dr Jack Szostak is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr Szostak’s research on telomeres, the DNA at the ends of chromosomes, contributed to our current understanding of cancer and ageing, and was recognised by the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr Szostak’s current research interests are in the laboratory synthesis of artificial cells and the origin of life on the early Earth.

Shoji Takeuchi received the BE, ME, and Dr Eng degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 1995, 1997, and 2000, respectively. He is currently a Professor in Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and filed over 70 patents. He has been recognised with numerous honours including Young Scientists' Prize, the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2008, the JSPS prize from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2010, ACS Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Awards in 2015, and  UNESCO Netexplo Award Winner 2019. His current research interests include 3D tissue fabrication, implantable devices, artificial lipid bilayer systems, and biohybrid MEMS.

Kate Adamala is a biochemist building synthetic cells. Her research aims at understanding chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. Kate’s research spans questions from the origin and earliest evolution of life, using synthetic biology to colonize space, to the future of biotechnology and medicine.

Dr Zhen Gu is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Director of the NIH Biotechnology Training in Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr Gu received his BS degree in Chemistry and MS degree in Polymer Chemistry and Physics from Nanjing University. In 2010, he obtained PhD from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. He was a Postdoctoral Associate working with Dr Robert Langer at MIT and Harvard Medical School during 2010 to 2012. Before he moved to UCLA in 2018, he had been appointed as a Jackson Family Distinguished Professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. Dr Gu’s group studies controlled drug delivery, biomaterials and cell therapy. He serves as an Associate Editor for Science Advances and Nano Research.

Wilhelm Huck is Professor of Physical Organic Chemistry at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University, he took up a position in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, where he was promoted to Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis (2004) and Full Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry (2007). In 2010 he moved to Radboud University, where he completely changed research fields to focus on understanding how living cells function and where they come from. His group use microfluidics to study chemical reaction networks, to construct minimal synthetic cells, and to develop new methods to determine reaction rates in signalling networks in individual cells. His group collaborates with a range of industrial partners to develop droplet microfluidics for single cell analysis. Wilhelm Huck is a member of the Advisory Board of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, and co-founder of Sphere Fluidics (Cambridge, UK).

Hagan Bayley is the Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. Major interests of his laboratory are the development of engineered pores for stochastic sensing, the study of covalent chemistry at the single molecule level, ultrarapid DNA sequencing and the fabrication of synthetic tissues. In 2005, Professor Bayley founded Oxford Nanopore to exploit the potential of stochastic sensing technology. The company has developed the MinION portable DNA sequencer. His research and entrepreneurial skills have been recognised several times. Professor Bayley was the 2009 Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2012 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry's Interdisciplinary Prize, in 2017 the Menelaus Medal of the Learned Society of Wales and in 2019 the Mullard Award of the Royal Society. In 2018, Professor Bayley held the Kavli Chair at the Delft University of Technology.

http://bayley.chem.ox.ac.uk/ 

Professor Cees Dekker is Distinguished University Professor at Delft University of Technology and KNAW Royal Academy Professor. Trained as a solid-state physicist, he discovered many of the exciting electronic properties of carbon nanotubes in the 1990s. Since 2000 he moved to single-molecule biophysics and nanobiology, with research from studies of DNA loop extrusion and supercoiling to DNA translocation through nanopores. More recently his research has focused on studying chromatin structure and cell division with bacteria on chip, while he is also attempting to ultimately build synthetic cells from the bottom up. Dekker is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and fellow to the APS and the IOP. Dekker headed the prestigious Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft as Director from 2010-2018. He initiated an entirely new Department of Bionanoscience at Delft and leads the 51M€ NWO Zwaartekracht program NanoFront. He published over 300 papers, received an honorary doctorate, and many prizes such as the 2001 Agilent Europhysics Prize, the 2003 Spinoza award, the 2012 ISNSCE Nanoscience Prize, and the 2017 NanoSmat Prize. In 2006, Delft University appointed him as an Institute Professor. In 2014, Dekker was knighted as Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and in 2015, he received his second ERC Advanced Grant and the KNAW appointed him as a Royal Academy Professor.

Petra Schwille is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Germany, and Honorary Professor at the LMU Munich. She studied physics and philosophy in Stuttgart and Göttingen, and graduated 1993 with Diploma in Physics at the Georg August University, Göttingen. She obtained her PhD in 1996 performed at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, she returned to the MPI Göttingen as a research group leader. In 2002, she accepted a Chair of Biophysics at the TU Dresden. Since 2011, she is heading the department Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the MPI of Biochemistry. Her scientific interests range from single molecule biophysics to the synthetic biology of reconstituted systems.

Pamela Silver received her BS in Chemistry and PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and she was a Fellow of the American Cancer Society and The Medical Foundation. Subsequently, Pam was an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Molecular Biology at Princeton University where she was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, a Research Scholar of the March of Dimes and was awarded an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. Pam moved to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where she was a Professor in the Dept of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. She was named a Claudia Adams Barr Investigator and awarded the Mentoring Award for the PhD Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. Pam became one of the founding members of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, the first Director of the Harvard University PhD Program in Systems Biology and one of the first members of the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.  Her work has been recognized by an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an NIH MERIT award, the Philosophical Society Lecture, a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is among the top global influencers in Synthetic Biology and her work was named one of the top 10 breakthroughs by the World Economic Forum. She serves on numerous public and private advisory board including the board of the Internationally Genetics Engineering Machines (iGEM) Competition, and she is the co-founder of several biotech companies.

Emiliano Altamura obtained a Master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Bari in 2010. Then, he moved to Rome to join Professor Pierluigi Luisi’s group, working on enzymatic reactions in compartmentalized systems. In 2012 he joined Professor Peter Walde’s group at the ETH in Zurich, collaborating on dendronized polymer-enzyme conjugates and their entrapment inside giant vesicles. In 2014 he received his PhD at the University of Bari, in Chemical and Molecular Science. From 2014 he has a postdoc position at the Chemistry Department of the University of Bari working on the project “Giant vesicles as minimal cell model systems”.