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SynBioBeta Speaker

Sakti Subramanian

Stanford University

Undergraduate

Sakti Subramanian is an undergraduate student at Stanford University majoring in Bioengineering. Sakti is one of the youngest individuals dedicated to the growth of synthetic biology, whether that be by solving biomedical research problems, educating the next generation of scientists, or authoring policy recommendations for the American bioeconomy. He holds leadership positions at Stanford University, the Great Lakes Synthetic Biology Association, the International Genetically Engineered Machine, and the Gathering for Open Science Hardware.

Sessions Featuring

Sakti

This Year

Breakout Session

•

3:30 PM

-

4:15 PM

Business of Biology

Decentralized Biology: Designing Community-Scale Bioeconomies

How can local communities benefit from biotechnology? This session explores strategies for building decentralized biotech ecosystems that support local innovation, shared ownership, and resilient bioeconomies. By aligning biotechnology with planetary stewardship and place-based knowledge, we highlight a new era of bio-based products and initiatives led by founders bringing their culture and community into biotechnology.

Featuring

Rolando Perez

Stanford University

Senior Scientist

Transdisciplinary practitioner bridging AIxBio, fungi, space, equity.

Leon Elcock

Independent

Researcher

Synbio community-builder championing “cyan-collar” biomanufacturing workforces.

Maria Astolfi

Keasling Lab, UCB

Doctoral Candidate

Indigenous Amazonian benefit-sharing advocate, AI genome-miner.

Onye Ahanotu

Ikenga Wines

Founder

Brewing science, culture, and sustainability

Sakti Subramanian

Stanford University

Undergraduate

Building the Midwest synbio community.

Callie Chappell

Stanford University

NSF Postdoc Fellow

Building “LABraries”—public-library biotech labs bringing biology to everyone.

Breakout Session

•

3:30 PM

-

4:15 PM

Business of Biology

Decentralized Biology: Designing Community-Scale Bioeconomies

How can local communities benefit from biotechnology? This session explores strategies for building decentralized biotech ecosystems that support local innovation, shared ownership, and resilient bioeconomies. By aligning biotechnology with planetary stewardship and place-based knowledge, we highlight a new era of bio-based products and initiatives led by founders bringing their culture and community into biotechnology.

Featuring

Rolando Perez

Stanford University

Senior Scientist

Transdisciplinary practitioner bridging AIxBio, fungi, space, equity.

Leon Elcock

Independent

Researcher

Synbio community-builder championing “cyan-collar” biomanufacturing workforces.

Maria Astolfi

Keasling Lab, UCB

Doctoral Candidate

Indigenous Amazonian benefit-sharing advocate, AI genome-miner.

Onye Ahanotu

Ikenga Wines

Founder

Brewing science, culture, and sustainability

Sakti Subramanian

Stanford University

Undergraduate

Building the Midwest synbio community.

Callie Chappell

Stanford University

NSF Postdoc Fellow

Building “LABraries”—public-library biotech labs bringing biology to everyone.

TBD

Session lineup still growing

Featuring

Speaker Coming Soon

Fireside Chat

•

12:00 AM

-

8:30 AM

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

Previous Speakers Include