Lukasz Bugaj is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Our mission is to understand the principles by which cell signaling drives cell behavior. We aim to determine how cells interpret their environment to make essential decisions like whether to divide, differentiate, or die. Towards these goals, our lab develops innovative light activatible – or, optogenetic – probes to perturb cell signals with exquisite spatial and temporal precision. We use these and other approaches to study cell diverse processes including stem cell differentiation, organogenesis, and the misregulation of cell growth in cancer. Our lab operates at the interface of systems biology, synthetic biology, and cellular engineering and draws on diverse disciplines including cell biology, protein engineering, imaging, electrical engineering, signal processing, and computer science. We integrate these approaches to uncover the operational principles of cell signaling and behavior, ultimately enabling predictive cellular control for therapeutic and industrial applications.”