About Christina Agapakis
Christina Agapakis is a biologist, writer, and artist interested in microbes and the future of biotechnology. She collaborates with engineers, designers, artists, and social scientists to explore the many unexpected connections between microbiology, technology, art, and popular culture. She has a BS in MCDB from Yale (2006) and a PhD in synthetic biology from Harvard, where she worked on producing hydrogen fuel in bacteria and making photosynthetic animals. She has taught designers at the Art Center College of Design and biomolecular engineers at UCLA, and she once made cheese using bacteria from the human body. Her writing on biology, technology, and culture has appeared in many outlets and she is a founding editor of Method Quarterly, a magazine about science in the making. She is currently creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company that is bringing biology to industrial engineering.
Christina Agapakis was named one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30 in Science and Healthcare in 2012. Dr. Agapakis has written as a blogger for Scientific American, a freelancer for numerous other publications, and is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Method Quarterly, a magazine about the process of scientific discovery. Her “microbial art” has been featured at galleries in Los Angeles, London, and Dublin. Bridging art, design, and writing, Dr. Agapakis brings synthetic microbiology to diverse audiences.