Michael Levin, Ph.D., is Vannevar Bush professor of biology at Tufts University, and Distinguished Professor at The School of Arts and Sciences. The capacity to generate a complex, behaving organism from the single cell of a fertilized egg is one of the most amazing aspects of biology. The Levin lab integrates approaches from developmental biology, computer science, and cognitive science to investigate the emergence of form and function.
Using biophysical and computational modeling approaches, we seek to understand the collective intelligence of cells, as they navigate physiological, transcriptional, morphogenetic, and behavioral spaces. We develop conceptual frameworks for basal cognition and diverse intelligence, including synthetic organisms and AI. Practical applications of our work involve repair of birth defects, regenerative medicine, cancer reprogramming, and synthetic bioengineering.
