Control Systems in Synthetic Biology

Mustafa Khammash is Professor of Control Theory and Systems Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at ETH Zürich. After receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 1990, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Iowa State University (ISU). While at ISU, he created the Dynamics and Control Program and led that control group until 2002, when he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In Santa Barbara, he served as Vice Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department from 2003 to 2006 and as the Director of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation from 2005 to 2011. In 2011 he moved with his group to Switzerland, joining the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich. At ETH, he served as the department chair (2015-2017). Khammash is a Fellow of the IEEE (2007), the International Federation of Automatic Control (2010), and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2003). He is a winner of the ISU Early Achievement in Research and Scholarship Award, the Young Engineering Research Faculty Award, the ETH Golden Owl Award, and the European Research Council Advanced Grant. Dr. Khammash works at the interface of the areas of control theory, systems biology, and synthetic biology. His research aims to understand the role of dynamics, feedback, and randomness in biology, and to develop the tools needed to aid in this understanding. Khammash’s group is currently developing the theory, computational methods, and experimental tools for controlling living cells using both computer and molecular control systems.

Yutaka Hori received the B.S degree in engineering, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in information science and technology from the University of Tokyo in 2008, 2010 and 2013, respectively. He held a postdoctoral appointment at California Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2016. In 2016, he joined Keio University, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interests lie in feedback control theory and its applications to synthetic biomolecular systems. He is a recipient of Takeda Best Paper Award from SICE in 2015, and Best Paper Award at Asian Control Conference in 2011, and is a Finalist of Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control in 2010. He has been serving as an associate editor of the Conference Editorial Board of IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a member of IEEE, SICE, and ISCIE.