Tufts University
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.
Michael Levin is a Developmental and Synthetic Biologist, working at the intersection of biophysics, regenerative medicine, and philosophy of mind. He is currently the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor at the Department of Biology at Tufts University, and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, as well as an associate faculty at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and co-directed with Josh Bongard of the Institute for Computationally-Designed Organisms. His experimental research focuses on questions of diverse intelligence, creating conceptual frameworks, computational tools, and biological assays for recognizing and communicating with unconventional minds in unfamiliar guises. Using evolved, engineered, and hybrid model systems, his group seeks to develop ways to expand our ability to relate to beings across the space of possible embodied cognitive systems, and understand how minds appear, scale, and transform in our universe. Biomedical applications of their work on the collective intelligence of cells as they navigate anatomical space range across birth defects, regeneration, cancer, and aging. He is the author of 440+ peer-reviewed papers and is a Fellow of the AAAS, having received awards including the Donald O. Hebb Award for "outstanding contributions to research in biological learning" from the International Neural Network Society. His work on the molecular basis of left-right asymmetry (Cell 1995) was chosen by the journal Nature as a “Milestone in Developmental Biology in the last century”.