Open Source Tools for Environmental Biotechnology: Accelerating Science and Increasing Equity

Biotechnology is a complex, time-consuming and expensive discipline, and even more so when we consider discovery or deployment of biotechnology at environmental scales. We need to deploy the right tools in the right place, at the right time and the right scale to generate impactful data and design safe and effective interventions. Those tools also need to be accessible to scientists from diverse geographies and backgrounds, enabling more equitable opportunities to shape the future of environmental biotechnology. In this lecture, Jennifer Molloy, Ph.D., Assistant Research Professor at the University of Cambridge & Group Leader at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, will discuss open source as one approach to achieving these goals. She will illustrate the benefits and remaining challenges through examples of existing software, hardware and “wetware” projects that are already accelerating science and increasing equity in environmental biotechnology.

This event is part of the “Engineered Microbes for Environmental Release” webinar series that brings together voices from synthetic biology, ecology, policy, science and technology studies, biotechnology, ethics, and history to explore the social, technological, and environmental dimensions of these innovations. Hosted by the Baker Institute’s Science and Technology Policy Program and co-sponsored by the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, this webinar series was supported by a grant from Schmidt Sciences and the National Science Foundation (#2223678 & #2515431).

This event is free and open to the public.