Conference Description
Synthetic biology uses basic biological building blocks to create fundamentally new cells, organisms, and biological functions not found in nature. This fast-growing discipline has the potential to advance many scientific fields, by providing new approaches and tools to probe living systems, and to revolutionize most major industries through the creation of designer biological technologies. Once focused on small genetic circuits and model bacterial organisms, the scope of synthetic biology has recently expanded to more complex systems and a diverse array of organisms. Fueling these developments are transformative technological advancements in our ability to sequence, edit, and synthesize entire genomes. As a result, synthetic biology applications have now extended into many new spaces, including medicine, through the recent advent of gene and cell therapies.
Thus, the field is now at an exciting and critical juncture. Synthetic biology is poised to offer radical solutions to confront some of our most significant global challenges, including climate change, food shortage, the rise of antibiotic resistance, ageing populations, and cancer. But this will only be possible through critical developments aimed at transforming this discipline into a truly predictive engineering science, including: establishing best practices for non-model organisms and mammalian cells, extending directed evolution techniques to entire pathways and systems, precision and large-scale genetic alterations in cells, orthogonalization, automation/design tools and systems modeling, and engineering principles for multicellularity and cell communities.
This Gordon Research Conference on Synthetic Biology, and accompanying Gordon Research Seminar, will provide a multidisciplinary forum to discuss progress and challenges in transforming biology into a predictive technology capable of addressing global challenges. In the spirit of Gordon Research Conferences, we will deliver an informal setting where scientists at all stages – graduates, post-doctoral fellows, established researchers and industrialists – from across the globe will have the opportunity to engage as a community, foster new collaborations, and discuss some of the key issues and questions, such as: What is required to make synthetic biology a more industrialized and information-rich technology? How can we facilitate more widespread adoption and integration of synthetic biology approaches and tools across the life sciences?
The topics, speakers, and discussion leaders for the conference sessions are displayed below. The conference chair is currently developing their detailed program, which will include the complete meeting schedule, as well as the talk titles for all speakers. The detailed program will be available by March 18, 2021. Please check back for updates.
Keynote Session: Genome Design, Synthesis, and Evolution
Discussion Leaders
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Karen Polizzi (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
Speakers
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Jason Chin (Medical Research Council, United Kingdom)
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Maitreya Dunham (University of Washington, USA)
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Yue (Chantal) Shen (BGI Research, China)
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Hiroaki Suga (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Design Principles of Genetic Circuits
Discussion Leaders
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Miki Ebisuya (EMBL Barcelona, Spain)
Speakers
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Caleb Bashor (Rice University, USA)
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Angela DePace (Harvard Medical School, USA)
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Rob Phillips (California Institute of Technology, USA)
Immune Cell Engineering
Discussion Leaders
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Jamie Spangler (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Speakers
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Kole Roybal (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
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Elizabeth Wayne (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
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Sai Reddy (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
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Evan Scott (Northwestern University, USA)
Keynote Session: Molecules and Medicines
Discussion Leaders
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Grant Murphy (Merck & Co., USA)
Speakers
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Maureen Hillenmeyer (Hexagon Bio, USA)
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Elizabeth Sattely (Stanford University, USA)
Biomolecule Design, Engineering, and Evolution
Discussion Leaders
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John Ngo (Boston University, USA)
Speakers
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Ming Hammond (University of Utah, USA)
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Jamie Spangler (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Engineering Patterns and Tissues
Discussion Leaders
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Elizabeth Wayne (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Speakers
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Pulin Li (Whitehead Institute, MIT, USA)
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Yolanda Schaerli (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
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Miki Ebisuya (EMBL Barcelona, Spain)
Keynote Session: Microbial Cell Factories
Discussion Leaders
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Maureen Hillenmeyer (Hexagon Bio, USA)
Speakers
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Jennifer Holmgren (LanzaTech Inc., USA)
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Sang Yup Lee (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea)
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Kevin Solomon (University of Delaware, USA)
Microbiome Engineering
Discussion Leaders
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Kevin Solomon (University of Delaware, USA)
Speakers
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Matthew Chang (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
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Mark Mimee (University of Chicago, USA)
COVID-19 Diagnostics and Therapeutics
Discussion Leaders
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Rob Phillips (California Institute of Technology, USA)
Speakers
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Sriram Kosuri (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
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Narendra Maheshri (Ginkgo Bioworks, USA)
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John Ngo (Boston University, USA)
