On this episode the molpigs team talks with Viktorija Glembockyte, a postdoc in the Tinnefeld lab at Ludwig-Maximilians University. Her research focuses on how we can make highly sensitive diagnostic tools for a variety of biomolecules using DNA origami to merge sensing with signal amplification. She describes how her scientific and management skil…

On this episode the molpigs team talks with Jacob Majikes, the ‘boring materials physics’ expert of the DNA origami field. We discuss the incentive structures of the field, Hatch Act violations*, and how guinea pig bedding relates to biologics production. He explains to us how the National Institute of Standards and Technology became interested in …

In this episode of the molpigs podcast, Hannah, Boya and Erik talk with Zibo Chen, a new professor at Westlake University about his scientific journey through the world of biological information system design. We discuss how he went from designing DNA, to proteins, to entire cellular systems. Designing with different materials requires different de…

On this episode, the molpigs team talks with Ashwin Gopinath about bridging size scales in nanomaterial size scales. We explore his journey from optical physics to learning DNA nanotechnology in the Rothemund lab and his current projects and vision for highly multiplexed molecular measurements. Ashwin's career path has been quite the adventure, sta…

Join the molpigs team for a discussion with Prof. Katherine Dunn from the University of Edinburgh about her work on using DNA nanotechnology for medical applications and her exciting new ideas regarding "electrosynbionics," using biological engineering to tackle hard problems in energy production and storage. She also discusses her experiences tran…

This week’s podcast is with Erika DeBenedictis, a new principal investigator who is founding her lab at the Crick Institute in London. Her lab will focus around the broad field of bioautomation, but before talking about any of that, we delve into her past. Erika is just another one in a long string of podcast guests who has had an unconventional en…

In this episode the molpigs team talks with Greg Tikhomirov about his experience starting a new molecular programming lab and his visions for “a new nanotechnology”. We learn about his journey from wanting to build large, beautiful molecules to his work at the interface between molecular design and material science. Greg Tikhomirov is an assistant …

Join the molpigs team for a conversation with Eva Bertosin about her work on building nanoscale rotors during her PhD with Hendrik Dietz. This is a "poster podcast," so we will occasionally be referencing figures in the associated poster which can be found at the link below. The DNA origami rotor was inspired by the rotational mechanism of ATP synt…

Join the molpigs team as they have a discussion with one of the theoretical giants of molecular programming: Anne Condon. Over the wide-ranging conversation, she shares her insights on NP-complete problems, solving RNA folding with good data, and how best to teach and mentor students in a manner that creates great researchers and facilitates divers…

On this episode Hannah, Boya, Erik and new co-host Dhaval sit down with Jurek Kozyra, founder of the molecular programming startup, Nanovery. Over the course of this wide-ranging interview, he tells us about how learning biology can help your dating life, his PhD work at the intersection of biotech and computer science and his early ventures in che…

Join us for a chat with Sam Schaffter, a postdoc at NIST working on realizing complex transcription-based strand displacement in living systems. We start the conversation with the story of how he made the transition from the molecular biology of food to molecular programming. We then move on to the details of his research on transcriptional circuit…

Join us for a relaxed chat with Sifang Chen, a science policy post-doc, for a slightly different discussion. We speak about Sifang’s past, how she got into DNA nanotech and molecular programming, her research on biosensors and DNA programmable materials, and how she switched to this field from quantum and graphene based devices. We then moved on to…

Today we’re talking with Damien Woods, a professor and molecular programmer at the Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University, Ireland. We first began by talking about how his early interests in dynamics and optical computers (the subject of his PhD thesis) led him to the field of molecular programming. We then move on to talking about one of Damien’s…

In our latest Meet The Molecular Programmer, our guest was David Doty. We dove right in to the way he splits his research time, which has been between software development, theory, and sometimes experiments! He talks about how his experience doing his first experiment made him realise the need for good software, as good software enables good experi…

This week we spoke with William Poole, a graduate student at Caltech working on quite a few topics! His research spans synthetic/systems biology to molecular programming, software development to chemical reaction network (CRN) theory, machine learning to cell free systems. We certainly had a lot to talk about! We started off by discussing BioCRNPyl…

Join us in this experimental episode as our conversation turns inwards! Instead of finding out about the life and interests of someone from the field, we share some of our own views and anecdotes. We discuss a little about who we are, graduate school, the definition of the field, and more. Hannah, the founder of molpigs, gives a bit of an insight i…

Today we are joined by Lee Organick, a PhD student in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) at the University of Washington. Lee is a biologist turned computer scientist and engineer, quite a unique transition! She explains how she was “forced” to take a computer science class in her undergrad, which opened up a completely new field of inter…

Join us this week for an extremely interesting conversation with Kent Kemmish, the founder and chief exorcist (yes, exorcist) officer of Molecular Reality, and the creator of the new, and world’s first “molecular” games console, the demonpore 64. This is our first podcast with a member of the molecular programming community who works in industry, a…

What do ant colonies have to do with molecular programming? In this podcast, we spoke with Namita Sarraf, a graduate student at Caltech in Lulu Qian’s group. We discuss her research, which revolves around the production of multifunctional and modular DNA robots. Namita takes inspiration from ant colony dynamics to design robots, which alone may exh…

Kate Adamala is a biochemist building synthetic cells at the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences. Her research aims at understanding chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. The interests of her lab span questions from the origin and earli…

In the third episode of our ‘Lab Pigs’ series, which highlights the research and journeys of early career researchers in our field, we talked with Erik Poppleton, of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Erik researches the use of computational modeling in informing the design of molecular machines. As part of this, he also develops …

In this episode we talked with Yuan-Jyue Chen, of Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, on some of his research into DNA Data Storage. Yuan focussed on two topics: random access of data, and the accompanying issues with stochasticity and errors, and an application of DNA storage for efficiently searching a large database of images by…

In the second episode of our 'Lab Pigs' series, which highlights the research and journeys of early career researchers in our field, we talked with Josie Kishi. Josie was instrumental in developing the Primer Exchange Reaction (PER) synthesis method and the related imaging method, SABER. As well as talking about these, we found out what excites her…

Join us this week for a long and interesting conversation with Tom Ouldridge of Imperial College London on Maxwell’s demon, Szilard’s engine, what people get wrong about thermodynamics and information theory, how this all relates to biology, and how his lab is using these ideas to develop exciting new approaches to molecular programming. Tom Ouldri…

Join us for the first of our ‘Lab Pigs’ series, in which we talk with early career researchers on their research and journey within our field. In this episode, we chatted with Dominic Scalise. We talked a lot with Dominic about his work towards building a stored program chemical computer. Dominic Scalise is a postdoctoral scholar in Lulu Qian’s lab…

Following on from Brenda's fantastic tutorial, we chatted with her to get answers to many questions, find out more about her lab's work, and get her thoughts on the future direction of this approach! --- Find more information at the episode page here: https://podcast.molpi.gs/media/rubenstein-b-2b86de754345/…

Join us for the first of our 'Meet the Molecular Programmer' series, in which we talk with seasoned academics in our field about their journey and life experiences. In this episode, we chatted with Prof. Rebecca Schulman. We briefly talked with Rebecca about her work from her early PhD journey to more recent work coming from her lab. We heard about…

For our first event, Brenda Rubenstein has presented a tutorial on her lab's approach to storage and computation, making use of the chemical properties of a variety of types of small molecules. This was a real tour-de-force, and is worth a watch. Be sure to listen to our subsequent Q&A session in a couple episodes time! Abstract: As transistors nea…