SCIENCE CAFE by Women, Life and Science
About this Event
Talk title: GNQ Bio-Avatar Meet Bioprinted Tumors: A New Playbook for Precision Oncology
Dr. Carmen Gil is the Director of Translational Research at GNQ Insilico, Inc., a TechBio company, developing AI-driven platforms for drug development and personalized medicine. GNQ's platform suite products are powered by its proprietary engine, the Quantum infused Biomedical Reasoning Model (Q-BRM), which is grounded in causal inference, elementary reaction kinetics-based pathway biology, and quantum-classical hybrid optimization.
Dr. Gil has been 3D bioprinting living cells since 2014 — back when printing with cells instead of plastic still raised eyebrows. Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, she got her start as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, where she co-authored a foundational study in the field, "Liquid-like Solids Support Cells in 3D" (ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 2016), one of the early papers demonstrating how soft, gel-like materials can cradle and grow cells in three dimensions. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UF, graduating summa cum laude and completing an honors thesis, as a Buick Achiever and Ronald E. McNair Scholar, and was selected for the NSF International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) program in Sydney, Australia. Beyond the IRES program, her Buick Achievers Scholarship funded a full semester abroad at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, where she carried out research alongside a full course load. She went on to complete her Master's and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering through the joint Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University program — the nation's top-ranked in biomedical engineering — where she engineered CT-visible 3D bioprinted cardiac patches, living tissue built to repair a damaged heart and be tracked non-invasively as it heals. The throughline of her decade in the field has been a clear and steady one: carrying bench science all the way to the patient.
Dr. Gil has authored 20 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and holds a patent, with funding support from the National Science Foundation and the American Heart Association. At GNQ, she leads the work that bridges the company's computational platform and real, patient-derived tissue — building 3D bioprinted tumor models grown from a patient's own cells to test which therapies are most likely to work before that patient ever takes them. That living, patient-specific lab work serves as a
real-world validation of the computational platform, grounding the model's predictions in physical evidence and feeding what it learns back into the engine.
When she's not engineering tissues, Dr. Gil can be found training for amateur bodybuilding competitions — including the 2022 NPC Clash of Titanz — or being outnumbered by her five rescue dogs and three red-footed tortoises at home.
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