SynBioBeta Speaker
Deena Emera
Buck Institute
Senior Scientist
Deena Emera, PhD, is an evolutionary biologist, author, and teacher. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree in Physical Anthropology from NYU, and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale. She has focused much of her career on the evolution of female biology, currently investigating the genetic basis of reproductive longevity in female whales at the Buck Institute’s Center for Healthy Aging in Women. Deena is also committed to science communication, writing articles and being featured in news outlets such as the Boston Globe and Time magazine, and recently publishing a book. In A Brief History of the Female Body (Sourcebooks, 2023), Deena draws on her expertise as a biologist and experience as a mother of four to explore the mysteries of the female body through an evolutionary lens.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Deena
This Year
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Human Health
Engineering Reproduction
From AI-powered drug discovery to genomic selection and ovarian longevity — one of the most technically complex and ethically charged frontiers in biotech.The biology of reproduction has always carried the weight of the human story. Now it carries the weight of the possible.Ovarian aging is being mapped at the molecular level. Genomic selection is moving from research settings into clinical practice. AI is accelerating drug discovery for conditions that have been chronically underfunded and chronically misunderstood. The tools exist. The data is accumulating. The ethical frameworks are being written in real time — by the scientists in this room.
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Human Health
Engineering Reproduction
From AI-powered drug discovery to genomic selection and ovarian longevity — one of the most technically complex and ethically charged frontiers in biotech.The biology of reproduction has always carried the weight of the human story. Now it carries the weight of the possible.Ovarian aging is being mapped at the molecular level. Genomic selection is moving from research settings into clinical practice. AI is accelerating drug discovery for conditions that have been chronically underfunded and chronically misunderstood. The tools exist. The data is accumulating. The ethical frameworks are being written in real time — by the scientists in this room.
Session lineup still growing
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
