2016 Opportunity Awards

Congratulations to the winners of this year's CCBS Opportunity Awards competition based on the theme of Mechanisms of Disease! Each winning proposal will receive $10,000 to be shared between the faculty for lab project expenses; and a $1,000 award for research supplies to be shared between student and/or postdoctoral participants. We look forward to hearing about the projects at next year's annual CCBS retreat scheduled for March 31 - April 2nd, 2017, due to be held in Pasadena, CA! 

New Interest Groups

Check out our New Interest Groups!

Click on the Community tab under Education & Outreach for more information about the Drosophila Interest Group, Cellular Metabolic Dynamics Interest Group, Prokaryotic Interest Group, and the Directed Evolution and Synthetic Biology Interest Group.

NSF GRFP 2016 Awardees

CCBS Opportunity Award Competition

Mechanisms of Disease

• Step I: Before 12:30 PM on Sunday, hand in (or email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) a one paragraph abstract (can even be handwritten) briefly describing the nature of the project

• Step II: Send a more complete description (up to three pages) by email by Monday April 4th, to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

And for those of you who already have a "smidgen, soupçon or waferthin" bit of data, Dr. Lander and the CCBS Players have some additional advice ... Write It Up ! 

We invite you to view "WETWARE: art | agency | animation" - an exhibition at the interface between biology, technology and art being shown at the Beall Center for Art & Technology in the Claire Trevor School of Arts. The exhibition runs until May 7, 2016.

WETWARE features art in the light of today’s convergent living technologies: While artists have previously staged “Artificial Life” through the hardware and software of computers and robotics to simulate living systems, increasingly it emerges from wetware itself. Whether touching upon the brain’s position between spiritualism and metabolism, the synthesis of luminescent protocells from scratch, or microbes that possess the technical ability to make gold and clean water, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of Synthetic Biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.

WETWARE presents beaded necklaces containing synthetic amino acids, protocells to simulate movements of phytoplankton, bacteria that produce energy to run a musical synthesizer, a desktop gene machine, A-Life parasites fed with electro trash, as well as an artificially grown brain-in-a-vat nourished with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. The exhibition juxtaposes art projects that creatively and critically investigate the anthropocentric mindset in engineered moist “Artificial life,” and the responsibility that arises with it. In WETWARE, the concepts of art, agency, and animation acquire new meanings, while aliveness is questioned in terms of components, circuits, and systems.

The exhibition features international artists who have increasingly extended their work towards wetware practices: Adam Brown, Gilberto Esparza, Thomas Feuerstein, Lucie Strecker & Klaus Spiess and Orkan Telhan. In addition Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (with sound by Richard Chartier) and Anna Dumitriu present new works developed during their three-week residencies at the Beall in collaboration with the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems and the UCI Newkirk Center for Science & Society.

WETWARE is curated by Beall Center Artistic Director David Familian and Jens Hauser, a Paris and Copenhagen based art curator, writer and media studies scholar who focuses on the interactions between art and technology. 

Free admission. Open to the Public.