Title: Systematic construction of nucleic acid circuits for cell-free, enzyme-free environments (Joint Sandia CSRI & UNM Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series)

Speaker: Prof. Erik Winfree, California Institute of Technology

Date/Time: Monday, November 22, 2010, 1:00 pm mountain time (12 noon Pacific time)       

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM) and 915/W133 in CA

Brief Abstract: In an attempt to understand how molecularly-encoded information can guide chemical processes and create complex structures and behaviors, we study what may be the conceptually simplest example of information-based chemistry: synthetic DNA, by itself, in a test tube.  The design space is remarkably rich.  In this talk, I will show how arbitrary digital and analog circuits can be constructed.  Both theoretical principles and experimental implementations will be presented.

Biography:     Erik Winfree is Professor of Computer Science, Computation & Neural Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech.  He is the recipient of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2006), the Tulip prize in DNA Computing (2003), the NSF PECASE/CAREER Award (2001), the ONR Young Investigators Award (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), and MIT Technology Review's first TR100 list of "top young innovators" (1999). Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 1999, Winfree was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton, and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT AI Lab. Winfree received a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech in 1998.

CSRI POC: S. Scott Collis, 505-284-1123