Shrikrishnan Sankaran is a research group leader at the INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Germany. He heads the Bioprogrammable Materials group that explores the multidisciplinary field of Engineered Living Materials combining synthetic biology and materials science. A major focus of the group is the development of Living Therapeutic Materials with genetically programmed functionalities capable of biosensing, smart drug delivery, and manipulation of cell behavior. For this, synthetic biology tools are used to program probiotic bacteria to perform these functions. These engineered bacteria are then incorporated in mechanically defined hydrogels, resulting in composite materials with highly versatile functionalities, a wide range of tunability, and in situ controllability.

Shrikrishnan did his PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands in the lab of Prof. Pascal Jonkheim. There he combined protein and bacterial engineering with supramolecular chemistry to create dynamic and stimuli-responsive biointerfaces. He followed this up with a Post-doctoral stint the in group of Prof. Aranzazu del Campo at the Leibniz Institute for New Materials, where he integrated engineered bacteria with hydrogels to create light-responsive living drug delivery constructs. Through this work, he established his independent junior research group in 2020 focusing on the engineering of probiotic bacteria with therapeutic capabilities. Along these lines, he is the Scientific Coordinator of a regional Leibniz Science Campus consortium working towards the development of Living Therapeutic Materials. He has also been co-organizing the international conference on Engineered Living Materials since 2020. His work has been widely published in Synthetic Biology, Materials science, and multi-disciplinary journals.