Engineering biology, forming people.
Research is also a way of forming people. I like teaching and I like research, and in the laboratory I do both at once.
Research is also forming people
Engineering principles, applied to biological systems, can solve real problems in health, food and the environment. Every project is also the place where my students learn to design an experiment, to recover when something fails, to work with people from other disciplines without losing rigor, and to defend a result against criticism. Publications matter, but the result I care about most is a master’s student who learned to defend an idea, or a doctoral student who pulled a contaminated bioreactor through.
After an internship at Ecopetrol I did another at Texas A&M University, with Jorge M. Seminario, and went back there for my doctorate with Katy C. Kao. In academia, every answered question split into a dozen new ones, and that is what hooked me. Katy taught me that delegating is a form of trust, that a student is a person first and a researcher second, and that their success is also one’s own. That is how I lead my group today.
The idea of vectors
I do research with the same idea of vectors that organizes my teaching. Every collaborator and every student arrives with a magnitude, a direction and a sense, and my job is to find the direction in which their vectors and mine add up to the largest resultant. That is how we work with the Institute for the Study of Inborn Errors of Metabolism at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana on therapies for lysosomal diseases, with Felipe Reinoso-Carvalho, of the School of Management, on how sound changes what we expect from a food, and with Enel Colombia S.A. E.S.P. (Enel) on the air of a town.
Ariel Coli
Ph.D. student at Saarland University, Germany
María Camila Henao
Scientist at VaxThera
Sebastián Rodríguez Patiño
Head of Technology at Sika
Julián Fernando Becerra-Encinales
Director of Technological Extension at Cenipalma
Four of the master’s and doctoral graduates of the group, and where they work now.
All the graduatesThis work shares four ideas: using microorganisms as factories, learning from how evolution already solved a problem, using artificial intelligence to move faster from hypothesis to design, and designing experiences that change what people eat. Research on my own teaching brings together the two things I enjoy most, and it is the newest line of my program.