Marsilius-Vorlesung

Bridging Science, Engineering, and Art:
From Mechanobiology to Human Organs-on-Chips

Monday, 10 July 2023, 4pm
The Great Hall of the Old University

            The lecture has been recorded and can be viewed on the University's YouTube channel.

Donald E. Ingber
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University

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Founding Director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University; Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology, Harvard Medical School & Boston Children’s Hospital; and Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

In this lecture, I will share my personal path from a serendipitous experience in an undergraduate art class that led to my discovery of how living cells are constructed using ‘tensegrity’ architecture and how this contributed to the birth of the field of Mechanobiology to my more recent work on human Organ Chips, which offer the possibility of replacing animal testing and advancing personalized medicine. I also will describe the burgeoning discipline of Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Institute I founded to develop bioinspired technologies to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges in medicine and the environment. The work I will describe breaks down boundaries between science, engineering, art, and design, and demonstrates that there are no boundaries to creativity.