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Issue 1: March 2023

From the Director

Welcome to the first newsletter for the CSIRO Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform (AEB FSP).

In this newsletter, I’m excited to share with you some of the initial projects kicking off in the AEB FSP, and bring you across the latest news. I’m also pleased to announce an Expression of Interest process for the first round of research student top-up scholarships.

We know that engineering biology has huge potential: to underpin industry transitions, improve environmental outcomes, enable circular economies, and deliver positive societal changes. Recent technological advances put the field in a great position to develop and deploy new technologies. These include the ability to generate large-scale biological data; and faster and more precise organism engineering and testing.

But if we are to realise engineering biology's benefits, we need to take a look at the way we conduct and deploy engineering biology. It needs to be faster and more predictive. We also need to harness technological advances to transform how biology is understood, engineered, and used. And we need to better understand how engineering biology can benefit society broadly.

That's why we established the Advanced Engineering Biology FSP.

We are working to transform the productivity of engineered biological systems at the protein, organism and process levels through our innovative bioproduction platforms theme. We are also developing tools that greatly reduce the time and resource requirements for new biotechnological solutions in our data-driven molecular design theme. And all of this is underpinned by social science delivered through our interdisciplinary decision-making theme that is looking to understand the potential impacts and benefits of engineering biology across society and environments.

We’ll have many more projects to announce as we grow our program at CSIRO over the next five years. We hope you enjoy the first newsletter of this series.

In closing, please keep an eye out for upcoming job adverts to be part of our team, and an invitation to our launch webinar on 7th June.

Thanks for joining us on the journey.

Robert Speight

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