Beckman Symposium 2015 - Innovation in the Biosphere

Uri Alon holds the Abisch-Frenkel Professorial Chair in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Faculty of Biology, Weitzmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. His research focuses on the cell-wide analysis of protein activity and how cells make decisions and process information. He is a systems biologist working to develop a "blueprint" of a living cell and has determined that the biochemical circuitry in the cell is composed of repeating circuit patterns called network motifs, each of which performs a specific information-processing task. The lab studies these biological networks and circuits, and more recently, has taken up studying the principles of human network interactions, using a combined experimental and theoretical approach, aiming to uncover general underlying principles that govern their functioning and evolution.

Adam Arkin is the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor of Bioengineering, College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Director, Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Co-Director, Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival. His laboratory for systems and synthetic biology seeks to uncover the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and to exploit them for applications. To do so, they are developing a framework to effectively combine comparative functional genomics, quantitative measurement of cellular dynamics, biophysical modeling of cellular networks, and cellular circuit design to ultimately facilitate applications in health, the environment, and bioenergy.

Karl Deisseroth is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the D. H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine. His research group pioneered optogenetics, a technology that uses light to control millisecond-precision activity patterns in defined cell types in the brains of freely moving mammals, and CLARITY, a chemical engineering technology that enables high-resolution structural and molecular access to intact brains. The lab continues to develop and apply these and other tools (integrated with optical, electrophysiological, computational, molecular, and behavioral approaches) for the study of neural physiology and behavior in freely moving mammals.

Jay Keasling is Professor of Bioengineering and the Hubbard Howe, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Director, Physical Biosciences Division, LBL and Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. Dr. Keasling's research focuses on the metabolic engineering of micro-organisms for degradation of environmental contaminants or for environmentally friendly synthesis. He has developed a number of new genetic and mathematical tools to allow more precise and reproducible control of metabolism. These tools are being used in such applications as synthesis of biodegradable polymers, accumulation of phosphate and heavy metals, and degradation of chlorinated and aromatic hydrocarbons, biodesulfurization of fossil fuels, and complete mineralization of organophosphate nerve agents and pesticides.

Stephen Quake is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Bioengineering at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The focus of his laboratory is the application of precision measurement to biological processes. The lab has pursued two main avenues of technology development in order to improve biological measurement techniques. The first has been to develop the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit: microfluidic large-scale integration (LSI). The devices take advantage of the unusual physics of fluids in small volumes. The second technology is the development and application of ultra-high throughput DNA sequencing technology, which led to the first demonstration of single molecule sequencing. Work in this area has opened up new research avenues in human genetics and immunology, and the development of new clinical diagnostics.