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.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Kaihang
This Year
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Tools & Tech
Genome as a Canvas: Composing Life at Scale
Reading, writing, and editing DNA were just the prelude. The next frontier is composition, designing complex genetic systems and large DNA architectures from first principles using AI-driven models and scalable synthesis technologies. As datasets grow and design tools mature, biology is shifting from incremental editing toward intentional genome-scale engineering. This new paradigm treats DNA not simply as a sequence to modify but as a programmable substrate where genes, regulatory elements, and entire genomic regions can be composed, tested, and iterated like engineered systems. Advances in generative design, large-scale DNA assembly, and precision integration technologies are enabling researchers to construct increasingly complex genetic structures with higher predictability and functional intent. From next-generation recombinases and genome restructuring platforms to AI-guided design workflows that bridge computation and physical DNA construction, the emerging toolkit is redefining how biological complexity is created. The session explores how compositional genome engineering could unlock new capabilities across therapeutics, industrial biology, and synthetic life design.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
David Ewing Duncan
Arc Fusion
CEO
Kaihang Wang
Caltech
Assistant Professor
Building synthetic genomes to create new life forms.
Samuel King
Stanford University
BioEng Doctoral Candidate
Genome language models designing new bacteriophages
Andrew Hessel
Human Genome Project
Chairman
Genome-writing pioneer, Singularity University visionary
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Tools & Tech
Genome as a Canvas: Composing Life at Scale
Reading, writing, and editing DNA were just the prelude. The next frontier is composition, designing complex genetic systems and large DNA architectures from first principles using AI-driven models and scalable synthesis technologies. As datasets grow and design tools mature, biology is shifting from incremental editing toward intentional genome-scale engineering. This new paradigm treats DNA not simply as a sequence to modify but as a programmable substrate where genes, regulatory elements, and entire genomic regions can be composed, tested, and iterated like engineered systems. Advances in generative design, large-scale DNA assembly, and precision integration technologies are enabling researchers to construct increasingly complex genetic structures with higher predictability and functional intent. From next-generation recombinases and genome restructuring platforms to AI-guided design workflows that bridge computation and physical DNA construction, the emerging toolkit is redefining how biological complexity is created. The session explores how compositional genome engineering could unlock new capabilities across therapeutics, industrial biology, and synthetic life design.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
David Ewing Duncan
Arc Fusion
CEO
Kaihang Wang
Caltech
Assistant Professor
Building synthetic genomes to create new life forms.
Samuel King
Stanford University
BioEng Doctoral Candidate
Genome language models designing new bacteriophages
Andrew Hessel
Human Genome Project
Chairman
Genome-writing pioneer, Singularity University visionary
Session lineup still growing
Purchase Pass
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?
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
