Do Your Vegetables Need a Vaccine? | Binge Thinking
About this Event
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Topic: Do Your Vegetables Need a Vaccine?
Speaker: Dr. Adam Caparco (Northeastern University)
Every year, plant diseases destroy more than $200 billion worth of crops worldwide.
Our main defense? Spraying massive amounts of chemical pesticides across farms — a strategy that is increasingly expensive, environmentally destructive, and less effective as pathogens evolve resistance.
But what if we could protect plants the same way we protect humans?
Dr. Adam Caparco’s research sits at the intersection of nanotechnology, chemical engineering, and agriculture. At Northeastern, his lab develops novel systems that use plant virus nanoparticles to deliver protective molecular cargo directly into living plants — helping crops defend themselves against disease without permanently altering their DNA.
Inspired by technologies originally developed for cancer drug delivery, this approach treats plant protection as a delivery problem: how do you get the right instructions into the right cells through biological barriers evolution spent hundreds of millions of years building?
Topics include:
- Why crop disease remains one of the biggest challenges in global agriculture
- The surprising similarities between human medicine and plant biology
- How nanotechnology can deliver molecules directly into plant cells
- Why chemical pesticides may become obsolete
- How plant virus nanoparticles can transport mRNA and other cargo through living plants
- What the future of precision agriculture might look like
This talk combines biology, medicine, nanotechnology, agriculture, and climate resilience to explore a radically different future for food production.
About the Speaker
Dr. Adam Caparco is a DiPietro Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Northeastern University whose research focuses on sustainable agriculture, environmental biotechnology, and protein engineering. He earned his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.
He leads the Caparco Research Group (Caparco Lab), which develops biotechnology solutions for sustainable agriculture and environmental remediation. During his doctoral studies, he received the prestigious STEM Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research in France.
Agenda
7:00 PM — Doors Open & Drinks
7:30 PM — Lecture Begins
8:10 PM — Audience Q&A
8:30 PM — Drinks & Conversation
9:00 PM — Event Ends
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 32.95
