Biography
Jean-Baptiste Lugagne is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Science.
His research explores the development of cell-machine interfaces to precisely control and optimize biological processes for Engineering Biology applications. He holds a Master’s degree in Signal Processing Engineering and earned his PhD in Synthetic Biology from Université Sorbonne Paris Cité. Following his doctoral studies, he conducted postdoctoral research at Boston University, where he focused on high-throughput single-cell control of gene expression.
He joined the Department in December 2024 and his research interests span Synthetic Biology & Biomanufacturing, Control Theory & Machine Learning, and Smart Microscopy & Microfluidics.
Research Interests
Jean-Baptiste Lugagne's research uses synthetic biology and lab automation to directly interface cells with control and optimization algorithms. His work focuses on developing and combining tools and technologies such as optogenetics, microfluidics, computer vision, automated microscopy, model predictive control, and active and reinforcement learning. The group’s research spans a broad range of questions and applications like antimicrobial resistance, strain engineering for biomanufacturing, fundamental microbiology, and biomaterials. Key questions driving this work include: How does single-cell growth rate influence production performance in bioreactors? Can algorithms learn to grow cell colonies into complex, arbitrary shapes? How can active learning accelerate the development of biotherapeutics or enable the engineering of new biology?
