SynBioBeta Speaker
Maria Astolfi
Keasling Lab, UCB
Doctoral Candidate
Born and raised in the Amazon rainforest, I am a bioengineer working at the intersection of synthetic biology and biodiversity protection. I co-founded the first synthetic biology laboratory in the Amazon in Brazil and am currently a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley with Prof. Jay Keasling. My work develops AI-guided automation to scale the biomanufacturing of medicinal molecules, replacing extractive, forest-cutting supply chains. I advocate for frameworks that return benefits to biodiversity stewards through equitable partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, positioning synthetic biology as a tool for stewardship within an ethical, circular bioeconomy.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Maria
This Year
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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.
Get a Ticket
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.
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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.
Get a Ticket
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.
Session lineup still growing
Get a Ticket
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
