20th TERMIS–AST–ISCT Joint Webinar

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

This webinar will explore the revolutionary field of living robots, focusing on breakthroughs in biologically-based robotics that combine computational design with the adaptive potential of living tissues. Experts will discuss how engineered organisms and innovative materials can self-organize, adapt, and respond, promising transformative applications in biomedicine, regenerative medicine, and beyond.

TERMIS, ISCT, and AST recognize they are pursuing overlapping objectives and have come together to launch a webinar series.

The purpose of the webinars is to share knowledge and to foster progress in organ bioengineering, towards the vision of regenerative medicine offering solutions for the future of organ transplantation.

 WEBINAR SPEAKERS

Dr. Joshua Bongard, PhD
Professor
University of Vermont
United States

Josh Bongard is the Veinott Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His work involves automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, crowdsourced-, and biological robots (so-called “xenobots”). A PECASE, TR35, and Cozzarelli Prize recipient, he has received funding from NSF, NASA, DARPA, ARO and the Sloan Foundation. He is the co-author of the book How The Body Shapes the Way We Think, the instructor of a reddit-based evolutionary robotics MOOC, and director of the robotics outreach program Twitch Plays Robotics. 

Dr. Michael Levin, PhD
Professor
Tufts University
United States

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. Dr. Levin’s work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.

Dr. Gizem Gumuskaya, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Tufts University & Harvard Wyss Institute
United States

Dr. Gizem Gumuskaya is an architect and synthetic biologist based in Boston, USA. Working at the intersection of design and biology, her research focuses on synthetic morphogenesis: reprogramming the morphogenetic code embodied in biological structures to create self-constructing living architectures by design. The latest example of these is her doctoral invention Anthrobots, the first human-derived self-constructing biological robots. Following a dual master’s degree’18 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Synthetic Biology and Computational Design, Gizem conducted her PhD’24 in Biology with Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University and at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Originally from Turkey, Gizem earned her Bachelor in Architecture’15 from Istanbul Technical University. More on her research can be found at www.gizemgumuskaya.com.