BDC Alumni Curiosity Conversation #2
Curiosity Conversations — March 23 at 7:00 PM EDT
Curiosity Conversations are a series of virtual meetups for BDC alumni to share their diverse professional journeys, network, celebrate successes, and commiserate. Featured alumni will share stories about their lives after BDC. The goal of these casual conversations is to give feedback, exchange knowledge, and cross-pollinate ideas. Current BDC students are also welcome.
Please RSVP here to receive Zoom invite.
We keep these gatherings small and limit them to 20 guests. If the event is full, you will be added to our waitlist and be notified if space becomes available!
March Speakers
Annick Saralegui
Annick Saralegui is a NYU Gallatin Individualized Study senior studying “Regenerative Futures”, a self-designed cross-disciplinary major that intersects ecological design, microbiology, and sustainable business. She is passionate about communicating the opportunities in microbes in achieving bioeconomic and regenerative goals to a broader audience that traverses business, science, and art worlds.
During her time at NYU, she has focused on learning biological principles through practical citizen science and explored regenerative opportunities to design biologically grown living materials and art while simultaneously understanding the business landscape of sustainable biotechnology. Being in both the design and sustainable business worlds, she found her role was to creatively communicate the powers of microbes through compelling visual narration. She believes that the properties of microbes can act as a platform to garner excitement, curiosity, and interest in regenerative design. In her most recent endeavor, she founded a climate science, culture, biology and design magazine known as “Symbiont.”
Sara Nejad
Sara is a NY based artist and designer with a multidisciplinary background in biodesign and human computer interaction. Leveraging the convergence of experience design, synthetic biology and engineering, she aims to speculate and design future food, biointerfaces, and regenerative closed-loop systems for long duration space exploration.
At NYU-IDM (MS, 2020), her research in food and Ag-tech ranged from hyper-localized farming alternatives to address challenges in the current food supply chain to speculative projects, imagining the future of food on earth and beyond.
In her master’s thesis, she converged her research in farming technologies, space food and astromicrobiology to speculate a bio-designed interplanetary future. In this imagined future, we apply synthetic biology to design bio-regenerative closed-loop life support systems that leverage the symbiotic relationship between microorganisms, fungi and humans to capture CO2 and use organic waste and turn it into O2, food and biomaterial.
Microbial Memories(BDC 2020, Science Sandbox for Public Engagement Prize Winner) is another speculative project inspired by symbiosis among microbes, humans and their environment. In this collaborative project with Nikhil Kumar, they drew inspiration from research pointing to the relationship between terroir and different flavor profiles in wine to design a microbial flavoring kit that captures and recreates memories with the aid of environmental microbiomes.