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
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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?
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