Michael Elowitz

Who is Michael Elowitz?

Michael B Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. In addition, he showed, for the first time, how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells. His work in Synthetic Biology and Noise represent two foundations of the field of Systems Biology.

He graduated with a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, and from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in 1999. In 1997-1998, he spent one year at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Heidelberg.