Michael Levin
Michael Levin is Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and an Associate Faculty at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard. He serves as the founding Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms at Tufts and University of Vermont.
Levin’s background is in computer science and biology, including a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard School of Medicine, which was awarded for the first discovery of a genetic pathway that enables embryonic organs to tell left from right. His highly interdisciplinary lab develops new tools to communicate complex goals to groups of cells, with novel applications in repair of birth defects, inducing regeneration of complex organs after injury, reprogramming cancer, and reversing aging. He is now perhaps best known for bringing the field of developmental bioelectricity into the age of molecular biology, developing the first tools to read and write information into the non-neural mind of the body.
More recent work also focuses on the emerging field of diverse intelligence – developing tools and concepts needed to recognize, and ethically relate to, a very wide range of evolved, engineered, and hybrid minds all around us. This work spans engineering, biophysics, and philosophy of mind, with major implications for AI, cyborg technology, and the ethics of unconventional beings. He has spearheaded the development of new, experimentally-grounded ways to recognize intelligence in unexpected embodiments, including novel living constructs such as Xenobots and Anthrobots – synthetic living systems that enrich personalized biomedicine, environmental sensing, and the future of AI-assisted robot scientist platforms.
He has published more than 450 peer-reviewed publications across numerous domains including science, engineering, and philosophy, receiving awards such as the Donald O. Hebb Award for “outstanding contributions to research in biological learning” from the International Neural Network Society.
