Engineering Cells, Building Circuits
AI and the Humanities Lecture Series Presents
Ron Weiss, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and is one of the pioneers in the field of synthetic biology. He is the first guest speaker in the AI and the Humanities Lecture Series with his talk entitled "Engineering Cells, Building Circuits."
His Weiss Lab uses computer engineering principles of abstraction, composition, and interface specifications to program cells with sensors and actuators precisely controlled by analog and digital logic circuitry. The primary work of the lab is in biocomputing, synthesizing RNA, and creating organoids. There are a wide variety of applications from biocomputing to research on disease using programmable petri dish organoids to creating synthetic RNA that can cure diseases. These biotechnological breakthroughs harness the ideas of computing to understand biology and how we can harness bioengineering to combat human disease.