From materials to robots with synthetic genes

Complex cellular behaviors such as motion and division are directed by far-from-equilibrium chemical networks that regulate the assembly and reconfiguration of a cell's architecture at the molecular scale. Synthetic genes might be used to, similarly, control and reconfigure human-made materials. Living cells might help us build new materials and synthetic biological circuits could control our soft robots and make our sensors or chemical processes work better. What will it take for us to develop these technologies? This lecture will provide some background about materials science and self-assembly and how these fields could intersect with synthetic biology. I will describe some of the challenges and research problems in this area and talk about some advances in the design of in vitro circuits for controlling materials and some autonomous material systems that can grow, move, and heal using synthetic genes and molecular circuits.

Dr. Schulman is the associate professor and Kent Croft Investment Management Faculty Scholar in the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Chemistry and Computer Science and a member of the Institute for Nanobiotechnology, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, the Chemistry-Biology Interface Program, the Center for Cell Dynamics and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at The Johns Hopkins University. She develops intelligent and adaptive biomolecular materials and nanostructures by combining ideas from materials science, circuit design and cell-free synthetic biology. Her work uses techniques from biophysics, biomolecular design, systems design and machine learning. Dr. Schulman joined JHU after working as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship in physics at UC Berkeley. She received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in computation and neural systems. She is the recipient of a Hartwell Individual Biomolecular Research Award, a President's Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), a DARPA Young Faculty Award and Directors Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, a Turing Scholar Award and a DOE Early Career