Lucia Marucci

Dr Lucia Marucci is a Fellow of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and an Associate Professor in Systems and Synthetic Biology at Bristol (UK). She also co-directs the Bristol Centre for Engineering Biology (BrisEngBio) and the Bristol BioDesign Institute (BBI). She holds a PhD in Automatic Engineering, and she was a European Molecular Biology (EMBO) fellow and a Medical Research Council (MRC) New Investigator. Her interdisciplinary group works at the interface of systems and synthetic biology with control engineering and computer science and is focused on the development of automated strategies to understand and design complex cellular phenotypes. Recent and ongoing research include: the combination of whole-cell mathematical models with optimization algorithms and machine learning to guide genome design; the design, modelling and experimental implementation of controllers (either embedded into cells or implemented externally) to steer gene expression and proliferation dynamics in both bacterial and mammalian cells; the development of multiscale models for 3D cell cultures and organoids.