Speakers:

Ekaterina Skorb did her PhD in Physical Chemistry. Now she is a Full Professor, Director of Infochemistry Scientific Center (ISC) at ITMO University. She was a postdoc and Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPIKG, Germany) with Prof. Helmuth Möhwald. From 2013 she worked with Prof. Peter Fratzl (MPIKG) as a Group Leader. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard (USA) in Prof. George Whitesides group (2016-2017). From 2017 she is working at ITMO University. An interdisciplinary view on the problems from various directions – chemistry, mathematics, IT, and biology – helps to solve complex issues and guide science development for the next generation. There are several ambitious projects running now at ISC ITMO University: synthetic cell, chemical computer, chemical origins-of-life as well as sensor, lab-on-a-chip, and implants development.

Lyndsey Walsh is an American artist, biodesigner, and researcher based in Berlin. She graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies in 2016 with a Bachelors in Individualized Studies and was awarded a Masters in Biological Arts from SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia in 2018. Lyndsey’s artistic practice and research centers on ideas related to performance- based approaches to experimenting with Biomedia and the aesthetics of knowledge systems.
Through artistic investigation, Lyndsey often reinterprets, critiques, and narrates how different social, political, and economic value systems largely influence the production of knowledge in science and art. Her philosophy as a biodesigner is to reinvent material and aesthetic approaches to create novel experimental laboratory protocols, imaging techniques, and biotechnology. Her collection of works entitled “Return of the Teratoma” inspired by her Masters thesis on the aesthetics and materiality of stem cell potential analyzes how stem cell materiality and the notion of potential is largely defined by economic desires influencing scientific research. Lyndsey primarily uses deconstructive artistic practices to create situations of absurdity and paradoxes in order to craft dialogues about the complexities scientific knowledge’s relationship to culture.
Lyndsey has practical background in science and art integration. She has worked professionally in science communication and production for television and radio, as a research consultant for the material design of biotechnologies, and as a researcher for institutes in the fields of Comparative Anatomy and Morphology, Veterinary Pathology, Neuroscience, Olfactory Science, and Marine Science. She is currently a visiting scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the Department of Experimental Biophysics.

Moderated by Laura Rodriguez