Team
Principal Investigators
Jane Calvert
Jane is a sociologist of science at the University of Edinburgh. She is particularly interested in the social dimensions of synthetic biology, including interdisciplinary interactions in the field, intellectual property and open source, and the roles of nature, design and aesthetics in synthetic biology. She has an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in Human Sciences from Sussex and an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science from the LSE. She did her doctoral work at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, on the idea of 'basic research'.
The University of Edinburgh
Old Surgeon’s Hall
High School Yards
Edinburgh EH1 1LZ
Scotland, UK
Drew Endy
Drew Endy grew up in Pennsylvania earning degrees in civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh, and a PhD in biochemical engineering at Dartmouth. He then studied microbiology and genetics as a postdoc at UT Austin and UW Madison. He worked with Roger Brent and Sydney Brenner at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. Drew joined MIT as a Fellow in Biology and Biological Engineering in 2002, later joining the faculty in the newly created Department of Biological Engineering. At MIT, Drew developed and taught 5 courses in helping to launch MIT's new undergraduate major in BE. Drew has helped found a few companies, the iGEM competition, the synthetic biology (SB#.0) conference series, and the BioBricks Foundation, a non-profit that is working to create open technology platforms supporting the next generation of biotech. His group at Stanford Bioengineering is working to implement scaleable genetic memory systems, for storing and controlling modest amounts of information inside living systems.
MC4201
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305-4201
USA
Alistair Elfick
During his training as a mechanical engineer at Durham University, Alistair became fascinated in the interactions of life and materials. A post-doc in the Medical School of Newcastle University gave him just enough insight to realise how much there is to know. A Fulbright Commission award to research at UC Berkeley gave him the freedom to continue to learn. An EPSRC fellowship to return to his home town of Edinburgh has allowed him, over the last 5 years and with the help of the iGEM teams, to really understand how much there is to know. And just how exciting the possibilities are...
Sanderson Building
The King’s Buildings
Edinburgh EH9 3JL
Scotland, UK
Postdoctoral Scholar
Design Fellow
Pablo Schyfter
Pablo Schyfter has an undergraduate degree in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral work, also at Edinburgh, focused on the sociology and philosophy of technology, and the uses of sociology of knowledge for these fields. More specifically, he worked with the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge on the questions of ontology and intelligibility as they relate to technological artefacts, subjects, and bodies as positioned entities in social life. He has engaged with age, ageing, and technology; sociophilosophical and phenomenological studies of science and technology; and feminist technology studies. Currently, he is working in the philosophies of technology and biology as these relate to synthetic biology.
MC4201
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305-4201
USA
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Daisy uses design to explore the implications of emerging and unfamiliar technologies, science and services. She is fascinated by the macroscopic view, the larger-scale social, cultural and ethical consequences of engineering invisible organisms. Daisy has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, a degree in Architecture from Cambridge University, and spent a year at Harvard University as a Herchel Smith scholar. Recent projects include E.chromi, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University's iGEM 2009 grand-prizewinning team, a residency at SymbioticA, the art and science collaborative laboratory at the University of Western Australia and a synbio science fiction short story for Icon magazine, UK, with SymbioticA’s Oron Catts. Daisy's work is currently exhibited in the Wellcome Trust’s windows in London until May 2010.
