The Contributors
Jessica Fox is the founder of Mythic Image Studios, creating music videos, shorts, commercials and documentaries. Her first novel, Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets (published by Short Books UK, Simon & Schuster USA and Bastei Lubbe, Germany) was Waterstone’s Book of the Month and listed in Oprah’s summer must reads. Jessica has also been a resident storyteller at NASA and was the artist in residence at the Synthetic Biology Lab at Edinburgh University. She writes articles about science and storytelling for the British Science Association and the Herald, and enjoys feeding her inner nerd by story consulting for science and tech organizations.
Dr Liz Fletcher spent seven happy years managing the University of Edinburgh’s synthetic biology research centres. Previously she worked at the lab bench before globetrotting to pursue an eclectic array of jobs in the biotech industry, publishing, innovation and economic development. Liz is now a director at an innovation centre supporting the growth of the biotechnology industry in Scotland.
Dr Gaynor Campbell is a senior research scientist at the Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology and with expertise in cell biology, human biology, immunology, and the physiology of the lungs.
Jamie Davies is Professor of Experimental Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, and leader of a laboratory in its Centre for Integrative Physiology. One of his main research interests is to understand how cells cooperate to form tissues during human development.
Maqsood Ahmed (or Max) was a post-doc at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine. His specialty is neural stem cell behaviour and how a family of proteins called extracellular matrix proteins regulate neural stem cells during development and in the adult brain. He now works for a biopharmaceutical company in Edinburgh.
Dr Alazne Dominguez-Monedero is a biological engineer who was a postdoctoral researcher in the UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology, University of Edinburgh, and in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA.
Professor Joyce Tait is the founding director of the Innogen Centre (now Institute), working on life science innovation and changing our thinking about how we regulate it.
Dr Alexander Shah (Alex) is a former PhD student in the University of Edinburgh Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology and is now working as a Data Engineer for the Kubrick Group in London. He likes to spend his free time writing more interesting lives. Favourite authors include Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro and Isaac Asimov.
Professor Tilo Kunath is a Chair of Regenerative Neurobiology at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, specialising in Parkinson’s disease.
Dr Abdenour Soufi specialises in cell regeneration and is a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh.
Pippa Goldschmidt is a writer particularly interested in using fiction to explore science and life in the lab. A few years ago she was a writer-in-residence at STIS (the science, technology and innovation study unit at the University of Edinburgh). During this residency she met Armstrong, the robot used by biologists at SynthSys, and wrote this story which first appeared in her collection ‘The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space’.
Once Upon a Biofuture: Tales for a New Millennium is an anthology of stories, from fiction to memoir, written by scientists about a powerful new technology that is re-engineering our world: synthetic biology. The authors, an international group of scientists, are based at the University of Edinburgh – alma mater of Darwin and home of Dolly the Sheep.