Spring Speaker Series: Christina Agapakis
The Nature Lab and RISD's Nature-Culture-Sustainability Concentration have joined forces to curate an ongoing speaker series featuring some of the leading voices in the world of biodesign. The inaugural lecture was delivered on March 13th by Christina Agapakis, Head of Creative at Ginkgo Bioworks, who spoke about her personal journey as a scientist and the complex ethical considerations involved in using biology as a manufacturing tool.
Christina traces her interest in biotechnology to watching Jurassic Park as a child, when she realized that the exciting science in the movie wasn't paleontology, but genetic engineering. After her lecture the audience had the opportunity to experience one of the products that Gingko Bioworks helped produce: a line of perfumes created by reverse-engineering extinct species of flowers from DNA samples taken at the Harvard University Herbaria, putting a distinctly floral twist on the Jurassic Park story line.
Bio:
Christina Agapakis is the Head of Creative at Ginkgo Bioworks, where she has been growing a team at the intersection of design, technology, and society since 2015. Her work focuses on the applications, implications, ethics, and aesthetics of synthetic biology, emerging from deep collaborations with scientists and engineers, artists and designers, and social scientists and researchers. Through work across a range of disciplines, media, and approaches, she works to enable collective imagination of positive futures of biotechnology and bring them to life.
View a recording of Christina's lecture here!
