ESP Biography



REN RAMLAN, Aspiring BioArtist and Synthetic Biology Professor




Major: Biological Engineering

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: G

Picture of Ren Ramlan

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Synthetic Biology student with a passion for creative and fun genetic engineering projects, such as glowing plants, bacterial petri dish paintings, or e coli engineered to smell like bananas. Let's learn how to program cells and imagine engineering with biology!



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

E15653: How to Make a Dragon: Introduction to Synthetic Biology in HSSP Summer 2023 (Jul. 09, 2023)
If you could build with biology like you can build with legos, what would you make? Imagine taking the parts and properties of one life form and giving them another. You could give humans the ability to camouflage like a chameleon, or make a tree that grows every kind of fruit. Maybe you could add bat wings to a lizard and create a real life dragon… Well, we’re not quite there yet, but you can still learn how to engineer biology! In this course, we’ll discuss the amazing field of Synthetic Biology and all the crazy things that are possible today. We’ll talk about glowing dogs, banana-scented bacteria, tadpoles with algae for blood… Come learn about CRISPR, GMOs, PCR, iGEM, and other whacky acronyms! You’ll end this course equipped with the basic knowledge you need to become the cellular programmers of the future.