Past Junior Fellow, Douglas Densmore, Aims to Advance Synthetic Biology
Douglas Densmore, former Junior Faculty Fellow and current associate professor at Boston University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was granted $10 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund his own “Expeditions in Computing” project. Densmore will lead the Living Computing Project along with the Lincoln Laboratory, a comprehensive effort to quantify synthetic biology using a computing engineering approach and to create a toolbox of carefully measured and catalogued biological parts that can be used to engineer organisms with predictable results. The award marks the first-ever funding for research that explicitly explores computing principles in multiple living organisms and openly archives the results.
Densmore believes he can use computing to move synthetic biology from a narrow field into a core engineering discipline, founded in quantifiable research and information. Additionally, he aims to help the computer science field better understand how computer principles can be applied to synthetic biology. Densmore also hopes to uncover more ways computer principles can be applied to natural systems, but recognizes the significant challenges of this work. His main focus and excitement is about synthetic biology and the amazing tools he wants to create, for example, developing a cell that can detect a cancerous transformation and then change its own state.