Distinguished Professor, Vannevar Bush chair, and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in Massachusetts, USA. His original degree and training was in computer science, followed by a PhD from Harvard School of Medicine in genetics. 

His group works at the intersection of developmental biology, computer science, and cognitive science to understand the scaling of basal cognition and decision-making during morphogenesis. Studying how the behaviour of tissue- and organ-level collectives is organized by bioelectric signalling among cells, his lab develops applications in regenerative medicine, artificial intelligence, and synthetic living machines.