Biological Inspiration for Technological Innovation

This talk will focus on bio-inspired principles for feedback control systems, as investigated within the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB). The ICB investigates the functioning of high-performance biological networks and uses these insights to design powerful new technologies for scalable and robust mobile ad hoc networking, reliable robotic flight and locomotion and control of autonomous vehicle networks. The ICB pioneers novel approaches in synthetic biology that enable design and analysis of biomolecular controllers with fault-tolerant performance for environmental protection, synthetic biological circuits for rapid signaling of chemical and biological threats, and simplified biosynthetic pathways for production of electronic and photonic nanomaterials.