SynBioBeta Speaker
Michael Ferrari
Moby
VP, Head of Research
Dr. Michael Ferrari is the Vice President of Research at Moby, and Senior Partner at AlphaGeo. His work emphasizes commercializing basic and applied research towards a variety of scientific, technical, and economic domains sitting at the deep tech, data, and industrial interface. Most of his work sits at the agriculture-energy--water-infrastructure nexus, and explores the confluence of three emerging global trends: natural resource geoeconomics, the agriculture-energy transition and technological evolution. He has built applied research teams at numerous early stage companies, as well as several large global corporations, including Syngenta, Point72 Asset Management, IBM, and Mars. Dr. Ferrari earned his PhD from Rutgers University focusing on computational fluid dynamics, applied nuclear science and environmental biophysics, where his research centered on better understanding the industrial/environmental interface and the earth/space/biosphere complex from both an information systems and an evolutionary perspective. His doctoral work in numerical modeling and applied mathematics was supported by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Michael
This Year
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Planetary Health
Rooted in Resilience: Speeding Up SynBio Crop Adaptation in a Rapidly Changing Climate
Climate volatility is reshaping the future of food, demanding plants that can withstand heat, drought, and disease. Synthetic biology offers powerful tools to accelerate adaptation—engineering plants with traits that once took decades to breed. This session explores how innovators are designing resilient plants, building platforms for rapid trait development, and forging collaborations across agtech, biotech, multinationals, and policy. Join us to hear how synbio is moving beyond the lab to the field, reshaping agriculture for resilience, and ensuring farmers worldwide can thrive in the face of climate uncertainty.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Joshua Geilhufe
Rhiza Bio Consulting
Principal
First-market strategist for synbio agriculture and fermentation.
Lyle Ralston
Bayer Crop Science
Crop Efficiency Platform Lead
Engineering Crops for global food security
Bruce Schnicker
Pivot Bio
Vice President, Product Development
Sowing the seeds for Biology's future
Michael Ferrari
Moby
VP, Head of Research
Data/AI “world-models” researcher bridging synbio to real markets.
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Planetary Health
Rooted in Resilience: Speeding Up SynBio Crop Adaptation in a Rapidly Changing Climate
Climate volatility is reshaping the future of food, demanding plants that can withstand heat, drought, and disease. Synthetic biology offers powerful tools to accelerate adaptation—engineering plants with traits that once took decades to breed. This session explores how innovators are designing resilient plants, building platforms for rapid trait development, and forging collaborations across agtech, biotech, multinationals, and policy. Join us to hear how synbio is moving beyond the lab to the field, reshaping agriculture for resilience, and ensuring farmers worldwide can thrive in the face of climate uncertainty.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Joshua Geilhufe
Rhiza Bio Consulting
Principal
First-market strategist for synbio agriculture and fermentation.
Lyle Ralston
Bayer Crop Science
Crop Efficiency Platform Lead
Engineering Crops for global food security
Bruce Schnicker
Pivot Bio
Vice President, Product Development
Sowing the seeds for Biology's future
Michael Ferrari
Moby
VP, Head of Research
Data/AI “world-models” researcher bridging synbio to real markets.
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?
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
