College of Science & Engineering

School/College	Institute for Bioengineering and Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology School of Engineering, College of Science & Engineering The University of Edinburgh
Email	Lucia.bandiera@ed.ac.uk
Telephone	0131 650 3528
Twitter	@bandiera_lucia

Research vision

My research is in synthetic biology and focuses on the development of methods to streamline mathematical modelling of endogenous or engineered biological systems. This goal is pursued by combining experimental techniques from life sciences (molecular, systems and synthetic biology) and computational/numerical methods from engineering (control theory). My research aims at: (a) determining how natural gene networks evolved into optimal solutions for specific functions and (b) exploiting such information to rewire faulty gene regulatory networks eliciting pathological states, such as single gene disorders (e.g. cystic fibrosis, Huntington disease and muscular dystrophy).

I am currently combining optimal experimental design and cutting edge techniques (i.e. microfluidics) to statistically define and implement the experimental schemes best suited to acquire informative data for model selection and identification of biological parts and synthetic circuits. The optimisation of the trade-off between quality of the data and amount of resources necessary for their acquisition will foster the widespread and systematic use of mathematical models in synthetic biology. Specifically, my research line will streamline the test and learn phases of the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle, leading to its automation. Such automation is essential if synthetic biology is to become a “platform technology”.

I aim to leverage on the computational and experimental skills I have developed so far to mathematically formalise the behaviour of genetic networks involved in single gene disorders

Expectations from collaboration

To promote the sharing of my methodologies and results on the systematic characterization of biological parts, I am seeking collaborations with a) synthetic biologists interested in using a model-guided design and debug of innovative and robust devices and b) industrial stakeholders in the biotechnology sector, who could exploit my results for application.

To enhance the use of a rational, bottom-up approach when investigating faulty gene networks and designing strategies to rewire them, I am further interested in collaborations with clinicians having expertise in Mendelian disorders. Indeed, yeast cells and microfluidic devices provide and ideal platform to explore hypothesis on which events trigger the pathological state and on potential control knobs to re-establish physiology.  

Key Skills

"I have extensive multidisciplinary training that spans from molecular and cellular biology to deterministic and stochastic modelling of dynamical systems. Further, I have also developed extensive expertise in cutting edge experimental techniques (e.g. microfluidics, microscopy, flow cytometry), optimal experimental design and statistical data analysis for large datasets (e.g. image processing, time-series analysis, model fitting and parameter optimization)."

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First published: 7 May 2019