Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group’s focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form.
The lab’s current main directions are: understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis; creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.
Summit 2025
Friday ·
9:00am
What if intelligence draws not only on biology, but on a deeper Platonic space of patterns that shape life and mind? Michael Levin’s latest work reframes consciousness as participation in this hidden architecture — where cells, bodies, and synthetic systems tap into shared structures of meaning. From bioelectric networks to diverse intelligences, he reveals selves as emergent, re-patterning processes.
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Summit 2024
Sunday ·
9:15am
Michael Levin talks about the emerging field of diverse intelligence and his frameworks for recognizing and communicating with the unconventional intelligence of cells, tissues, and biological robots. This work has led to new approaches to regenerative medicine, cancer, and bioengineering, but also to new ways to understand evolution and embodied minds. He sketches out a space of possibilities — freedom of embodiment — which facilitates imagining a hopeful future of synthbiosis, in which AI is just one of a wide range of new bodies and minds. Elena Sergeeva expands on Mike’s talk on inter-kingdom communication and biotechnology interfaces, including her work building a new generation of computer chips based on live neural tissues as a future substrate for AGI.
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