Michael Elowitz PhD

Michael Elowitz is an HHMI Investigator and Professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton in 1999, and did postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University, before moving to Caltech in 2003. Dr. Elowitz's research has focused on understanding the design principles that allow circuits of interacting genes and proteins to perform their many critical and amazing functions in living cells. In 2000 he showed how a simple circuit of three repressor genes could produce clock-like protein oscillations in individual bacterial cells. This circuit, dubbed the Repressilator, helped start the new field of synthetic biology.