Michael Elowitz


Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. In addition, he showed, for the first time, how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells. His work in Synthetic Biology and Noise represent two foundations of the field of Systems Biology.

Career

His laboratory studies the dynamics of genetic circuits in individual living cells using synthetic biology, time-lapse microscopy, and mathematical modeling, with a particular focus on the way in which cells make use of noise to implement behaviors that would be difficult or impossible without it.
Recently, his lab has expanded their approaches beyond bacteria to include eukaryotic and mammalian cells.

Life

Elowitz grew up in Los Angeles, California, where he attended the humanities magnet at Alexander Hamilton High School.
He studied Physics and graduated with a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, and from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in 1999.
In 1997-1998, he spent one year at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Heidelberg.
Afterwards, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York City.
While working as a graduate student at Princeton he co-authored songs such as Sunday at the Lab with Uri Alon.

Awards

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