Christina Agapakis is a biological designer whose research focuses on engineering new relationships between organisms, from the bacteria in our food and on our skin to photosynthetic animals. She received her Ph.D. in synthetic biology from Harvard in 2011 and was
Christina Agapakis is a biological designer whose research focuses on engineering new relationships between organisms, from the bacteria in our food and on our skin to photosynthetic animals. She received her Ph.D. in synthetic biology from Harvard in 2011 and was a research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. She explores the connections between art, design, science, and engineering as a Synthetic Aesthetics resident and on her blog at Scientific American. For the past five years, she has worked as the creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology company based in Boston. As creative director, she engages with people, policies, and potential futures involved in synthetic biology, working for more open, equitable, and renewable technologies. Her work takes many forms, from a long-term artistic collaboration to produce the scent of an extinct flower, to policies promoting diversity and transparency, to a magazine that asks “what if we could grow anything?”