Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab

The Community Biotechnology Initiative (CBI) works at the intersection of community organizing and movement building, collective intelligence and social sciences, and accessible biotechnology tool development to activate the global movement around grassroots-driven life sciences, or “Community Bio.”

We believe that the emergent power of decentralized, diverse communities, augmented with digital tools and democratized biotechnologies, can drive disruptive innovations in the life sciences to inspire creativity and improve lives.

Our projects include low-cost, open-source hardware, microfluidic systems, infrastructure for sharing lab-on-a chip device designs, global synthetic biology education curriculum, collective-intelligence based crowd-sourcing platforms, and new interfaces for artistic expression with biology.

CBI is supported by the National Science Foundation, MIT J-Wel, and Millipore Sigma.