DrYuvalElani

Summary

For group website visit: www.elanigroup.org

Dr Yuval Elani is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at Imperial Chemical Engineering. He leads the Bioinspired Engineering Group which consists of 25 PDRAs and PhD students. Yuval is an expert in synthetic biology, bio-membrane engineering, opto- / microfluidics, and molecular bioengineering.

Since completing his PhD in 2015 Yuval has secured > £4M as PI to conduct both blue-skies and applied research and has set up multiple collaborations with clinicians and industry (including AstraZeneca, Syngenta and GSK Vaccines). He has won multiple prizes and medals, including the Roscoe Medal, Rita and John Cornforth Medal, IC President’s Medal, and the RSC Felix Franks Medal for Biotechnology.

We take inspiration from biological systems to create a new generation of bioinspired technologies. Using biomolecular machines, exploiting synthetic molecular componentry, emulating cellular architectural motifs, and developing underpinning frontier technologies, we are able to engineer micro-devices on cellular length scales. 

Our ambition is to usher in a new era of biodesign where artificial cells can be engineered from the bottom up for bespoke applications: designer micromachines that can be used to deliver drugs, manufacture chemicals, generate their own energy, produce novel materials, and act as environmental sensors. It will allow us to not only mimic biology, but to surpass it: incorporating wholly synthetic building blocks, of the sort that biology cannot access, will give engineered lifeforms new capabilities.

Prior to joining Imperial, Yuval was at Cambridge University where he studied Natural Sciences.  Yuval was recently honoured by the World Economic Forum, who selected him to be part of their Young Scientist Community (50 under 40 worldwide), and he sits on the EPSRC Early Career Forum for Engineering.

CURRENT ROLES 

• Co-Director of the Membrane Biophysics Platform
• Co-Founder and Co-Director of fabriCELL
• Member of Executive of Leverhulme Cellular Bionics Centre
• Board member of the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology 
• Member of EPSRC Early Career Forum for Engineering
• Associate Editor for Experimental Biology and Medicine

HONOURS, PRIZES & AWARDs

2023 Nicklin Medal, Institution of Chemical Engineers
2022 Biophysical Science Institute, Judith Howard Prize 
2021 Royal Society of Chemistry Felix Franks Medal for Biotechnology
2021 BBSRC/NSF Lead Agency Grant w. Caltech (PI)
2020 EPSRC New Horizons Grant (PI)
2020 Appointed to Faculty of ChemEng at Imperial
2020 UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
2019 President Medal, Outstanding Early Career Researcher
2019 Imperial College Research Fellowship
2018 Associate Fellow of Higher Education Academy 
2017 Royal Society of Chemistry Rita & John Cornforth Medal 
2017 World Economic Forum, '50 under 40' 
2016 EPSRC Fellowship 
2015 EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship 
2015 Roscoe Medal, Parliamentary & Scientific Committee 
2011 Lord Porter Prize 

RESEARCH areas 

Yuval leads a multi-disciplinary group that develop new biochemical technologies that can be exploited in the fundamental and applied sciences. Specific research areas include: 

1. ARTIFICIAL CELLS. We design and build synthetic cells that possess behaviours that are the hallmarks of life: motility, energy generation, communication, replication, computation, protein production, self-repair, and evolution. We are seeking to exploit these behaviours in biomedical contexts (including synthetic cell therapies).

2. MICROFLUIDICS. We are constantly developing new state-of-the-art microfluidic technologies for synthetic biology applications, as well as to address challenges identified by our academic, industrial and clinical collaborators. These include continuous flow and microdroplet technologies, as well as opto-fluidic tools.

3. SOFT PARTICLE ENGINEERING. We develop new platforms which enable precision engineering of nano/micro-scale soft particles with user-defined architectures. We can control the shape, molecular topology, number of compartments, lipid composition, membrane asymmetry, phase, compartment connectivity, and encapsulated cargo of the particles. We are particularly interested in designing novel stimuli-responsive membranes that can release content in response to various intrinsic/extrinsic cues (temperature, light, magnetic fields, acoustic waves, pH, hypoxia). These particles are being developed for drug and vaccine delivery and for microreactor applications. 

 4. BIOMIMETIC CELL MODELS. By blurring the boundaries between living and non-living matter, we use artificial cells as highly-controlled models to answer fundamental questions of biological/biomedical relevance, and as tools that feed into drug/agrichem discovery pipelines.

 5. CELLULAR BIONICS. We are interested in fusing our engineered (inanimate) biochemical microsystems with biological cells to yield living/synthetic composite systems. We embed living cells in synthetic ones, engineer them to act as organelles within the hybrid entity, and create populations of interacting living and synthetic cells

 6. ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS. We develop technologies to bypass bottlenecks that are hindering the deployment of artificial cells in real-world applications. These include scaling up generation throughput through new manufacturing strategies, scaling down their size, and increasing their shelf-life and life-time. 

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES 

Postdoc FUNDING 

We are currently recruiting for three postdocs start in September 2023. These positions cover the full spectrum of the group’s research activities: synthetic cells, microfluidics, BioHybrid engineering, and therapeutic applications. If you are interested in joining the team as a postdoc please email your CV to Yuval.

PHD FUNDING 

We currently have two fully-funded PhD studentships available for an October 2024 start: These are open to both home and international students. 

These studentships involve the development of new technologies to generate vesicle-based synthetic cells and architecturally complex nanoparticles. This will involve designing and working with novel bio-membranes, cell-free protein expression systems, gene circuits, as well as microfluidic platforms. These will be multi-disciplinary projects which, depending on the applicant’s background and research interests, will span across one or more of the research areas of molecular bioengineering, chemical biology, synthetic biology, soft matter, membrane biophysics, and microfluidics. If you are interested in applying, and if you would like to hear more about these projects, please send your CV to Yuval.

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We are always on the lookout for excellent MRes, PhDs, PDRAs, and fellows to join the group. If you are interested, please get in touch directly at y.elani@imperial.ac.uk 

Prospective PhD students should be aware of the President's PhD Scholarship Scheme, Schrödinger Scholarship Scheme, China Scholarship Council, and Imperial Marshall Scholarship. We have accepted MRes students from research programmes in Chemical Biology, Plant Chemical Biology, and Nanomaterials in the past, but those on other courses who would like to work with us are welcome to get in touch. 

We would also welcome interest to join the group as a postdoc fellow (e.g. on Marie Curie,  EPSRC and BBSRC schemes)

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