Ahmad (Mo) Khalil
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
- Title Professor of Biomedical Engineering
- Email khalil@bu.edu
- Education B.S., Stanford University
M.S., Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Our laboratory develops novel tools of synthetic and systems biology that allow us to construct regulatory circuits inside living cells that recapitulate complex functions like those seen in nature. We are using our tools to dissect the molecular circuits that control gene regulation in eukaryotes, toward addressing the grand challenge of understanding their organization across scale and how they function to generate diverse cellular phenotypes. The basic insights we generate inform the development of platforms to program therapeutically-useful cellular functions for emerging gene and cell-based therapies, such as CAR-T cells for cancer. In addition, our team is developing novel continuous evolution technologies that are automated and scalable, and applying these to generate biomolecules with radically altered or new functions to address unmet needs in biology, medicine, and biotechnology. To broaden the impact of our basic science and medical discoveries, we make the technologies we develop widely usable and accessible to the scientific community. Overall, by learning how to build biological systems from scratch, our broad goal is to connect the molecular building blocks of life to a comprehensive understanding of cellular behavior and ultimately to clinical and other applications.