Genetic Design Automation
Researchers are now able to engineer synthetic genetic circuits for a range of applications in the environmental, medical, and energy domains. Crucial to the success of these efforts is the development of methods and tools for genetic design automation (GDA). While inspiration can be drawn from experiences with electronic design automation (EDA), design with a genetic material poses several challenges. In particular, genetic circuits are composed of very noisy components making their behavior more asynchronous, analog, and stochastic in nature. This talk presents our research in the development of the GDA tool, iBioSim, which leverages our past experiences in asynchronous circuit synthesis and formal verification to address these challenges. The iBioSim tool enables the synthetic biologist to construct models in a familiar graphical form, analyze them using a variety of methods that leverage efficient abstractions, visualize their analysis results using an intuitive interface, and ultimately synthesize a genetic implementation from a library of genetic parts. Each step of this design process utilizes standard data representation formats enabling the ready exchange of results.

Bio:

Chris J. Myers received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Chinese history in 1991 from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1993 and 1995, respectively. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT. Dr. Myers is the author of over 150 technical papers and the textbooks Asynchronous Circuit Design and Engineering Genetic Circuits. He is also a co-inventor on 4 patents. His research interests include asynchronous circuit design, formal verification of analog/mixed signal circuits and cyber-physical systems, and modeling, analysis, and design of genetic circuits. Dr. Myers received an NSF Fellowship in 1991, an NSF CAREER award in 1996, and best paper awards at the 1999 and 2007 Symposiums on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems. Dr. Myers is a Fellow of the IEEE, and he is a Member of the Editorial Board for ACS Synthetic Biology, Engineering Biology, Synthetic Biology and IEEE Life Sciences Letters and has served on the Editorial Boards for the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, IEEE Design & Test Magazine, and Springer journal on Formal Methods in System Design. Dr. Myers has also served as an editor for the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) standard and is on the steering committee for the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) standard.
Date: 9 November 2016, 17:00 (Wednesday, 5th week, Michaelmas 2016)
Venue: Thom Building, Parks Road OX1 3PJ
Venue Details: LR 2
Speaker: Chris J. Myers (University of Utah)
Part of: SynBio.Oxford
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: James Scott-Brown