Mon, 04/16/2018 - 18:00

Nina Tandon is at the cutting edge of science where sci-fi meets reality. As CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, the world’s first company growing living human bones for skeletal reconstruction, she works on growing artificial hearts and bones that can be put into the body. Beyond her work at EpiBone, she studies the new frontier of biotech: homes, textiles, and video games made of cells. Named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” and one of Foreign Policy’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers,” she is a leader in biomedical engineering, and an expert on how biology's new industrial revolution will impact the future of healthcare and technology.

In this talk, Tandon will describe how we can create smarter technologies by making cells, nature’s elemental building blocks, our partners in design through an array of innovative possibilities: broken bridges that can self-heal, one-stop body shops for human body parts that render organ donation obsolete, PETA-friendly porterhouse steaks, living looms spinning high-tech fabrics. She’ll also confront the philosophical and ethical questions that come with playing with the power of life via today’s technological revolution and collaborative biohacking labs. 

Tandon is a TED Senior Fellow and adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the Cooper Union in New York City. She received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Cooper Union; a master’s in bioelectrical engineering from MIT; a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. She is the co-author of Super Cells: Building with Biology with Mitchell Joachim.

Free and open to the public, with a reception to follow. Sponsored by the Newcomb-Tulane College Dean's Office. For more info, email mweber3@tulane.edu.

The Crossroads Colloquium is a forum for interdisciplinary conversation on issues of relevance to both humanities and sciences. 

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