Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular cell Biology and Genetics; University of Saarland, Department of Synthetic Biology

Dora Tang received her PhD from Imperial College London in the area of Membrane biophysics and did two post-docs at the University of Bristol. The first was in the area of Origin of Life and the second in Synthetic Biology as part of the BrisSynBio. In 2016, she started her independent research lab at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and genetics, in Dresden as part of the MaxSynBio. In 2023, she became professor in Synthetic Biology at the University of Saarland, Germany. She runs a interdisciplinary research programme with the overarching goal to build living systems from a minimal number of parts using bottom up approaches. To do this, she integrates, compartments, reactions and communication to construct synthetic cellular systems that can support and sustain out-of-equilibrium behaviour. Her lab uses a variety of methods and techniques from soft matter self-assembly to cell free methods and quantitative biophysical characterization to construct and characterize synthetic cellular systems. This provides the capability to unravel the physico-chemical principles of living systems to address questions in the origin of life, in modern biology and in engineering.