Symposium Sessions

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Living cells ranging from bacteria to those derived from plants and animals have become universal engineering materials for constructing artificial or biomimetic multicellular systems for application in a variety of societal sectors, including biomedicine, energy, agriculture, and environment. Engineers now not only have this new class of materials to play with, but also the opportunity to explore a whole new set of engineering principles leveraging biology. Tremendous opportunities exist for both experimental and theoretical innovations. This symposium thus intends to capture this critical moment and help promote this emerging field, by offering an international forum for discussion on the design principles and theories, fabrication methods, and particular applications of engineered multicellular constructs that may take the form of a circuit, device or subsystem. Abstracts are also sought for (1) engineering functional cellular interfaces with the goal of facilitating a larger scale multicellular assembly and wiring, and (2) applying these engineered constructs in the context of a large system, e.g. implantation into an organism.

This symposium will be of interest to a diverse population of interdisciplinary scientists involved with the development, characterization and application of cell-based constructs for a variety of bioinspired or biorelevant applications. This symposium is open to those engineering efforts that intend to build entirely biological constructs bearing a rational design. Also of interest are the use of non-biological/non-living materials for assisting fabrication of the biological constructs, as well as approaches and studies on biointegration of these engineered constructs in an organism. In addition, this symposium will provide an integrated forum to facilitate coherent interdisciplinary discussions among participants on the basis of applied living materials research toward addressing major challenges in this emerging field. It will also provide a medium to motivate discussions of the societal and economic connections that together will shape this fast-evolving field.

Topics will include:

• Design principles and theories
• Synthetic cell parts, cellular interface engineering
• 2D and 3D tissue microfabrication techniques, microdevices to facilitate structure and functional bioconstruction
• Developmental and regenerative engineering, self-assembly and self-organization
• Genetic engineering to facilitate self-assembly and self-organization
• Biocircuits, biocomputers, biofuel cells, biodevices and biobots
• Living neural implants, living bioelectronics, neuro-electronic hybrids, hybrid devices and systems
• Cortical neural tissue engineering, retinal engineering
• Synthetic morphology, artificial life

Invited Speakers:

• Rashid Bashir (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Itzhaq Cohen-Karni (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Leroy Cronin (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)
• Tara Deans (The University of Utah, USA)
• Rylie Green (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Hanlee Ji (Stanford University, USA)
• Ali Khademhosseini (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• YongTae Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Cecilia Leal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Michael Levin (Tufts University, USA)
• Carmel Majidi (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Manu Mannoor (Alabama State University, USA)
• Josep Samitier Martí (Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Spain)
• Joseph Najem (The Pennsylvaia State University, USA)
• Yoonkey Nam (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, USA)
• Kevin Parker (Harvard University, USA)
• Ada Poon (Stanford University, USA)
• Jacob Robinson (Rice University, USA)
• Shoji Takeuchi (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Tsachy Weissman (Stanford University, USA)
• Lingchong You (Duke University, USA)

Symposium Organizers