was in the chemistry building picking up an exam, and a professor who saw him standing near his door invited him in, thinking he was a student who had applied for a summer job. (That student never showed up.)

I happened to be standing there, so we started talking, Voigt recalls. He was doing protein folding and because of the work that I had been doing on catalysis, I was able to converse with him on some of the theoretical underpinnings of protein folding, and thats how I got the job. Thats how I got into biology, but I had never really taken any classes in it.

In graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, he started to work on directed evolution of proteins  specifically, developing a computerprogram that would identify locations in a protein where mutations would produce a better protein. During a postdoctoral stint at the University of California at Berkeley, he became interested in synthetic biology, which was then just emerging as a new field, based on the idea that novel biological circuits could be assembled from a set of standardized parts  in this case, genes.

At Berkeley, Voigt worked on extracting genetic circuits from a bacterium called B. subtilis and reconstituting them in E. coli, so they could be studied in isolation. Upon joining the faculty at UCSF, he started working on building simple circuits such as a sensor that would respond to a specific stimulus, which led to his bacterial camera.

Complex circuits

Voigt, who is co-directing MITs new Synthetic Biology Center,