Com­put­er sci­ence and en­gi­neer­ing, meet drug R&D. MIT star Tim­o­thy Lu in­ter­twines tech­nolo­gies for an off­beat biotech launch

At 37, Tim­o­thy Lu’s life and work has al­ready spanned sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­plines and cul­tures. He’s lived in Asia and the US, and af­ter gath­er­ing de­grees in elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing and com­put­er sci­ence at MIT, he struck out to pick up his med­ical de­gree at Har­vard Med and then a PhD at the Har­vard-MIT Health Sci­ences and Tech­nol­o­gy Med­ical En­gi­neer­ing and Med­ical Physics Pro­gram.

Knit­ting that all to­geth­er at the Syn­thet­ic Bi­ol­o­gy Group at MIT, Lu has be­come one of the pi­o­neers in the field, tack­ling dis­ease by cre­at­ing a ge­net­ic cir­cuit pro­gram­ming plat­form that could one day start fix­ing the er­rant code in our ge­net­ics that trig­gers dis­ease.

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