Lecture

Domitilla Del Vecchio is a Professor and member of the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT. In this lecture, she will review the current state of engineering biology, with some of its applications and its technical challenges. Thanks to the advances of new technologies in the past two decades, it has become possible to engineer living organisms for various applications, from energy to health, to the environment. For example, it has become possible to engineer bugs such that, once injected in the bloodstream, localize at the location of a tumor, recognize it, and degrade it. In this lecture, she will review the current state of engineering biology, with some of its applications and its technical challenges. Moreover, she will focus on the lack of robustness of engineered cells and ways to ensure more predictable and reliable behavior. Providing robust, predictable, and reliable behavior will be critical for the concrete application of these technologies in real life.

Domitilla Del Vecchio received the Ph. D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering (Automation) from the University of Rome at Tor Vergata in 2005 and 1999, respectively. From 2006 to 2010, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2010, she joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently a Professor and member of the Synthetic Biology Center. She is a recipient of the 2020 DoD Award for Transformative Research During COVID pandemic, of the 2016 Bose Research Award (MIT), the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council (2010), the NSF Career Award (2007), the American Control Conference Best Student Paper Award (2004), and the Bank of Italy Fellowship (2000).