Filippo Menolascina
Director of Research at Bayes Centre
- Institute for Bioengineering
- School of Engineering
- University of Edinburgh
Contact details
- Email: filippo.menolascina@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Mary Bruck 3.10, King's Buildings
- City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH9 3BF
Background
Filippo Menolascina is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh, the Director of Research of the Bayes Centre. An Electrical Engineer and Computer Scientist by training (BSc ’06, MSc ’08), Prof Menolascina obtained his PhD in 2011 by defending a thesis that provided the first demonstration of in vivo real-time control of a complex synthetic gene network. His doctoral work pioneered the field now known as cybergenetics. As a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof Menolascina extended these results to the control of complex traits emerging from biomolecular networks, providing the first demonstration of real-time control of aerotaxis in B. subtilis.
Research summary
Prof Menolascina, a former EPSRC Innovation Fellow, leads the University of Edinburgh’s cSynBioSys group which combines in silico methods and in vivo experiments to pursue two complementary goals: elucidating the design principles of living systems -i.e. understanding the instruction-set of life, and using these primitives to re-program cells. The overarching goal of the cSynBioSys group is to develop a Model-Based Biosystem Engineering framework for Engineering Biology, i.e. a model-based approach to automating the design of synthetic circuits that aims to make engineered cells as easy to build and program as computers are today.