Reflections on a 20-year pseudo-random walk among ivory towers and startups

Confessions of a wanderer: reflections on a 20-year-long pseudo-random walk among ivory towers and startup trenches

In this talk I will explore my journey between academic research and entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing from personal experience, I'll discuss how scientific discovery can lead to unexpected commercial opportunities, the challenges of translating academic work into business value, and my best take on strategies for navigating both worlds effectively. I'll share key decision points, lessons learnt, and practical frameworks for researchers considering entrepreneurial paths. I will aim to provide insights for colleagues interested in commercialisation as well as entrepreneurs looking to leverage academic research to innovate.

Filippo Menolascina holds the Chair of Engineering Biology at the University of Edinburgh. An Electrical Engineer and Computer Scientist by training (BSc ’06, MSc ’08), Prof Menolascina obtained his PhD in 2011 by defending a thesis that provided the first demonstration of in vivo real-time control of a complex synthetic gene network. His doctoral work pioneered the field now known as cybergenetics. As a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof Menolascina extended these results to the control of complex traits emerging from biomolecular networks, providing the first demonstration of real-time control of aerotaxis in B. subtilis. He now leads the University of Edinburgh’s cSynBioSys group which combines in silico methods and in vivo experiments to pursue two complementary goals: elucidating the design principles of living systems -i.e. understanding the instruction-set of life, and using these primitives to re-program cells. The overarching goal of the cSynBioSys group is to develop a Model-Based Biosystem Engineering framework for Engineering Biology, i.e. a model-based approach to automating the design of synthetic circuits that aims to make engineered cells as easy to build and program as computers are today.