Sara Molinari

After a few training years in cancer cell studies and systems biology, I turned my attention to synthetic biology and, in particular, I got interest in engineered living materials (ELMs). During my PhD in Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology at Rice University, I engineered bacterial cell differentiation as a tool for the creation of multi-strain bacterial “tissues”. This work was published in Nature Chemical Biology in 2019. As a postdoctoral researcher, I created the first macroscopic de novo engineered living material, growing from genetically modified cells. I am currently working on transferring this technology into multiple bacterial strain in oder to generate living materials with tailored biological and mechanical properties.