Michael Levin

Tufts University

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, where he directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His laboratory pioneered the study of bioelectricity — the endogenous voltage gradients and ion-channel signaling that cells use to coordinate anatomy during embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer suppression — demonstrating that manipulating these bioelectric patterns can induce regeneration of complex organs and reprogram tissue-level form. Levin co-created the xenobots, the first AI-designed self-healing living machines built from frog stem cells, and later the anthrobots assembled from human cells. He has translated this work into commercial ventures: Morphoceuticals (regenerative medicine, co-founded with David Kaplan), Fauna Systems (xenobot manufacturing), and Astonishing Labs (aging and anthrobot interventions). His research is funded by DARPA, the Allen Discovery program, and federal grants exceeding $8M for scalable living-machine fabrication, making his group an unusually active node of academic-to-industry technology transfer in synthetic and developmental biology.