© MATT KALINOWSKITimothy Lu has straddled different worlds nearly his entire life, having spent the first half of his childhood in the U.S. and the second half in Taiwan. Academically, his experiences have been just as varied. Lu has studied electrical engineering, computer science, synthetic biology, and medicine. This stew of experience has made him into something of a Renaissance bioengineer—a researcher with computational skills, genetics know-how, and clinical knowledge to guide his pursuits. “He has a very unusual background,” says Yoel Fink, director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. “There are not many people who have done what he’s done.”
As an undergraduate and master’s student, Lu studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, but he got the sense that the big problems in those fields had already been solved. At the same time, around 2003, synthetic biology was blossoming, and Lu wanted in.
For his PhD, Lu joined the lab of synthetic biologist Jim Collins, then at Boston University. Again, Lu was bridging different worlds: his advisor’s lab was at BU, but his degree-granting institutions were across town at Harvard and MIT. Among his accomplishments at the bench, Lu engineered a bacteriophage that could break up biofilms.1 In 2009, collaborating with two fellow graduate students, he used the work to launch a biotech firm, now called Sample6, that uses customized phages to detect ...
