Adaptive by Design: Biologically Informed Engineering

Biology shapes design & materials. Explore living systems' adaptability in advanced materials, devices & sensing tech.

Biology offers a powerful blueprint for rethinking how we discover and build engineered systems. Adaptive by Design: Biologically Informed Engineering examines how ideas rooted in living systems, such as adaptability, efficiency, and responsive behavior, are driving new approaches to engineering across disciplines.

This Leading Edge webinar will explore how AI is accelerating hypothesis generation by identifying patterns across biology, materials science, and engineering, and how advances in sensing, imaging, and instrumentation are translating these insights into systems for testing and deployment. Together, these approaches form a continuous pipeline from idea generation to engineered application.

Through a cross‑disciplinary lens, the session will highlight how biologically informed design bridges digital and physical domains. Discussion will include perspectives on AI‑driven discovery workflows, such as the work at Unreasonable Labs, that accelerate innovation, complement experimental validation, and expand scientific and technological frontiers, as well as approaches that connect modeling, simulation, and experimentation to transform theoretical concepts into practical devices capable of interacting with real environments.

Registration Questions: ocrevents@mit.edu