T-Y Dora Tang

T-Y Dora Tang received her PhD from Imperial College London, UK, in 2010 in the area of membrane biophysics. After one year as an EPSRC Knowledge Tansfer Secondee at Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire, UK, she undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Bristol, UK, in the areas of origin of life (2011-2014) and  synthetic biology (2014-2016) with the BrisSynBio. In 2016, she started her independent lab at  MPI-CBG, Dresden, as part of the MaxSynBio consortium. She accepted a  a Professorship in Synthetic Biology at the University of Saarland in 2022.

Her research is driven by a desire  to understand how pools of molecules come together to produce cells capable of all life’s functions. She uses bottom-up synthetic biology approaches, coupled with  quantitative biophysical and chemical characterisation, with the goal of building and characterising minimal synthetic cellular systems from scratch. These minimal cells are applied as physical models for understanding the role of compartmentalisation for bringing together and tuning molecular reactions,  addressing questions in the origin of life and modern biological cells. In the long term, she aims to apply these fundamental insights to engineering minimal systems that are more efficient than biological systems. 

ERC Project - Unravelling the Chemical Physical Principles of Life through Minimal Synthetic Cellularity (MinSynCell)

Synthetic life: building minimal cells from scratch