Maria Astolfi

I am an engineer who builds purpose-driven tech with biology.

A decade ago in 2013, I co-created the first SynBio Lab in the Amazon region (Brazil) with a mission to weave together biodiversity and cutting-edge tech to protect the rainforest. Our projects were backed by Google and won awards at MIT competitions. In 2018, I joined Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston (USA) to make biology easier to engineer with automation and artificial intelligence. To bring benefits back to where I am from, I co-founded and ran a non-profit program, #DesignWithBiology with the iGEM Foundation, that partnered with Ginkgo and Opentrons, reaching +1500 people from 15 countries.

I am pursuing my PhD in Bioengineering with Prof. Jay Keasling at the University of California in Berkeley and San Francisco.

September 2023