SynBioBeta Speaker
Kaihang Wang
Caltech
Assistant Professor
Born and raised in Beijing, China, Kaihang began his academic path at Peking University before moving to London to complete his undergraduate studies at University College London. His passion for discovery soon led him to Cambridge University, where he pursued his PhD and postdoctoral research with Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009; former President of the Royal Society) and Prof. Jason Chin (now founding director of GBI, Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford). In 2018, he began at Caltech, joining as an Assistant Professor and launching a lab dedicated to rewriting the foundations of biology.Kaihang’s scientific imagination has always been nourished by both science fiction and ancient history. From Jurassic Park to Dune, from The Three-Body Problem to the myths of pharaohs and emperors chasing immortality, he has drawn inspiration from humanity’s timeless fascination with life’s origins and possibilities. These stories sparked a lifelong pursuit: the dream of not just reading life’s code but learning how to write it anew — constructing entire genomes from scratch to encode and enable novel life forms and functions beyond the limits of nature.Along the way, he has pioneered multiple transformative technologies — including REXER and GENESIS — that make large-scale genome construction possible. His leadership helped complete the first de novo creation of a synthetic bacterial genome with a redefined genetic code. Today, his lab continues to expand the scale of DNA writing, from the design of its basic building blocks to the assembly of whole living systems. His ultimate vision is to turn life into a predictive engineering material, reshaping how humanity understands and builds biology.
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