Cooney Lecture: Engineering Wonder: Biotechnology as a Creative Medium for Innovation

Speaker: Jasmina Aganovic, Founder and CEO, Arcaea Biotechnology has transformed medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing by enabling us to understand and engineer living systems. But what if there is more to biotechnology than manufacturing? Once we think through the lens of biology, could it be possible to create entirely new human experiences? In this lecture, Aganovic shares her journey from MIT Chemical Engineering to founding Arcaea, a biology-first beauty company working at the intersection of biology, design, and consumer products. She will draw on examples from synthetic biology, genomics, and fragrance and explore what it takes to translate scientific discovery into products that enable new claims, new product experiences and new stories. All of this with the purpose to inspire curiosity, possibility, and connection with nature through technology, not just utility. Along the way, she will share her perspective that the next generation of innovation-led companies will require more than technical excellence. They will require a new kind of organization, where scientists, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs work together to transform biology into a creative medium capable of reshaping how we experience the natural world, bringing us closer to it, not further away.