Joseph Jacobson is a physicist and associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he leads the Molecular Machines Group of the MIT Media Lab and is a founding member of the Center for Bits and Atoms. He became famous for developing e-ink (electronic ink) technology – the basis of every e-reader.
Together with his team at MIT, however, Jacobson has pioneered work in several other areas to date, such as next-generation error-correcting gene synthesis for programming cells to produce new drugs, renewable chemicals, fuels, and foods, as well as genomically recoded organisms for programmatically building non-natural proteins and genome editing.
Jacobson’s lab is currently focused on combining artificial intelligence and machine learning with high-throughput synthesis and testing to design novel proteins and small molecules for a range of applications.