2025 ELM Workshop - October 22-24, 2025

2025 ELM Workshop

The Engineered Living Materials Workshop brings together academic, industry, and agency collaborators to discuss the promise and challenges of engineered living materials (ELMs). This developing material class has additional or unique functionalities resulting from the inclusion of living cells on or within the material. These functionalities can include self-assembly, self-repair, and activity that can enable increased resilience, conversion of compounds, biomaterial production, drug manufacturing, energy generation or storage, and more. ELMs are expected to provide improved sustainability in material development, manufacturing, deployment, and use.

The workshop promises to be a blend of fundamental and applied presentations on ELM research, small working groups, and moderated panels to define priority research areas, identify central challenges and potential solutions, and understand the needs of this emerging community.

Sessions will explore:

• Advances in manufacturing and functionality of ELMs.
• Exploration of diverse chassis and matrices for ELMs.
• Current challenges in scalability and societal adoption of ELMs.
• Educating and training the next generation workforce.
• Funding and collaborative opportunities in the ELMs field.

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Host or Publisher Rice Synthetic Biology Institute