David S. Glass
Systems & synthetic biologist, theorist
I am a synthetic biologist and theorist interested in understanding multicellularity. How do individual cells work in concert despite evolutionary pressures to compete? How do such cooperating groups of cells self-organize into intricate functional patterns? How can we engineer multicellularity to produce efficient microbial consortia, living materials, and artificial tissues?
Research
Multicellular groups are hard to define, hard to understand, and even harder to engineer. I combine mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to engineer core multicellular behaviors into otherwise single-celled E. coli. These multicellular groups serve as controllable “model organisms” for uncovering fundamental principles underlying multicellularity.