Simone Schuerle was the kind of girl who built cars for her Barbies instead of brushing their hair. “That was maybe an early indication that I was more interested in engineering,” she says. Focusing at first on industrial engineering as an undergrad at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Schuerle then gravitated toward the physics department after she happened to hear a lecture on microsystems technology. “I learned . . . how to fabricate very tiny systems, and I was just fascinated about the huge space and rich engineering opportunities at the nanoscale,” she says. Schuerle is now an assistant professor of biomedical systems engineering at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, where her research combines “the intelligence of bacteria,” which are especially adept at finding nutrient-rich, low-oxygen tumors, with magnetic fields to design microrobots to traverse the body and deliver drugs.
Synthetic biologist Tal Danino still remembers his dad buying ...
