MIT Alumni Event - LA High Table featuring Caltech Professor Michael Elowitz
(NOT A CCLA SPONSORED EVENT)
Location: Private home in Silver Lake, exact address will be sent to all registrants the Friday prior to the event.
Event format: 30 min mingling, 60 min High Table Program featuring Dr. Michael Elowitz, 60 min networking and discussion post-talk with potluck refreshments.
Join Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton alums for a Los Angeles High Table mixer aimed at showcasing dynamic speakers in an intimate setting that facilitates connection with your fellow alumni.
About the speaker:
Michael Elowitz is the Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He and his synthetic biology lab seek to program new capabilities in living cells, in order to understand biology, develop new therapeutic strategies, and explore a broad space of potential biological behaviors.
Dr. Elowitz was born in Los Angeles and received his B.A. in Physics 1992 from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in 1999 from Princeton University. In his PhD work, Dr. Elowitz demonstrated one of the first biological circuits, where parts of a cell are engineered to perform functions that mimic electronic circuits. The genes he inserted into E. Coli bacteria caused oscillations of the cells’ production of a florescent protein in a way that mimicked an electronic clock.
After several years as a postdoctoral scholar at Rockefeller University, Dr. Elowitz returned to Los Angeles where he has been a professor at Caltech since 2003. An early focus of his research group was the role that noise plays in biological circuits – Dr. Elowitz’s group showed that natural cellular circuits have evolved to expect a noisy environment and use this environment to help regulate gene expression.
Dr. Elowitz’s approach can be described as “build to understand.” His group both engineers new biological circuits and analyzes/modifies existing ones in order to understand how simple cellular components (genes and proteins) produced observed cellular behaviors. In a recent breakthrough, the group found a new way to read protein-building RNA molecules without destroying large parts of the cell, and thus better see cellular processes in action. Active research in his lab includes finding ways to expand these kinds of techniques to larger groups of cells to develop a view of the entire biological system. Such an understanding will be enable development of novel biological-circuit based therapeutics for diseases such as cancer.
Dr. Elowitz has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007, a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2008, and the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics in 2019. In 2004, he appeared in Technology Review Magazine’s list of top innovators. Dr. Dr. Elowitz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Potluck suggestions:
We ask that you please bring a dish to share for lunch. Suggestions by last name are below:
- A-H: Main Dishes
- I-P: Desserts / Drinks
- Q-Z: Salads / Appetizers
Parking & Accessibility:
Free street parking is available. There is a flight of outdoor stairs to descend before you get to the house.
Cost:
$5 per person
Click here to RSVP
Contact:
For questions about the event please email Anurag Sood, VP Programs @ MIT Club of Socal (anusood@alum.mit.edu)