IWBDA 2026

Conference Dates

June 13-14, 2026 (Tutorials)
June 18-20, 2026 (Workshop)

Conference Location

June 13-14, 18: KOBL 352
June 19-20: ECCS 201
University of Colorado Boulder

Suggested Hotel

Limelight Hotel (Please use the Promo Code received after registration to obtain a discounted rate)

Important Dates

Abstract Submission
April 3 April 9 (Firm), 2026

Notice of Abstract Acceptance
May 1, 2026

Scholarship Application Deadline
May 1, 2026

IWBDA 2026 Logo

Announcements

IWBDA Scholarships

IWBDA Scholarships are available for students, postdocs, and young researchers. Please see this PDF for details.

This year applications will be accepted via this Google form: Scholarship Application Form.

Allan Kuchinsky IWBDA Scholarship

This year IWBDA will be soliciting applications for the 6th annual Allan Kuchinsky International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation Scholarship. Allan was a tremendous supporter of both synthetic biology as well as design automation. His contributions to projects such as Cytoscape and Eugene as well as numerous Agilent efforts was crucial in helping academic and industrial researchers develop state-of-the-art technologies and tools to lay the foundation for this field. This scholarship in some small measure attempts to recognize his tireless efforts by highlighting a student who shares Allan’s vision for the field. This scholarship will provide support for one recipient to attend IWBDA (registration, airfare, hotel, and small travel stipend) along with a recognized poster presentation slot. Interested individuals should provide the following: IWBDA abstract, resume/CV, essay, and recommendation letter. For details, including how to apply, please see this PDF.

Call for Papers

Join us for the 18th annual International Workshop on Biodesign Automation (IWBDA) meeting in Boulder, CO, June 18-20, 2026. This year, IWBDA will take place immediately after Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution, & Design (SEED) 2026 and will include presentation and poster talks selected from submitted abstracts, Birds of a Feather discussions, and breakout sessions on selected topics. We aim to bring together academic researchers and industry partners to push the field of bio-design automation for synthetic biology forward. The field of biology is still lagging behind the industry when it comes to implementation and adoption of computational and digital solutions. This is primarily because it is extremely difficult to offer a one-size-fits-all solution to engineer biology. Some BDA solutions serve as templates for a larger problem; however, to make them usable in a practical setting, the solutions often have to be redesigned for bespoke biological workflows. Without understanding the requirements of the broader synthetic biology community, it is hard to design a solution that can have a wider impact. Increasing the efficiency of biological processes and workflows with biodesign automation is a continuous journey that requires fresh exchange of ideas. It is crucial for the BDA community to have a forum where they can collaborate, gather new perspectives, and understand the requirements of the broader synthetic biology community. IWBDA provides this forum for cross-disciplinary discussion, with the aim of seeding and fostering collaboration between the researchers from the synthetic biology, systems biology, and design automation communities.

Topics of Interest:

  • Design methodologies for synthetic biology
  • Standardization of biological components
  • Biosecurity in lab automation processes
  • Biopreparedness through bio-design automation
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning in synthetic biology
  • Computer aided design tools and automation for engineering biology
  • Biofoundries and their impact on synthetic biology
  • Formalized protocol capture
  • Design Build Test Case studies
  • Synthetic Biology education and outreach

Tutorials

Before the SEED Conference this year, please join us in Boulder, CO for the IWBDA 2026 Tutorials on June 13-14, an immersive hands-on experience with synthetic biology software tools. Parallel tutorials will be offered for users and developers, allowing participants to tailor their learning experience to their level of expertise and interests. The user tutorials will guide participants through the complete synthetic biology workflow using open-source tools. The developer tutorial will introduce libraries and other resources to create standard-enabled synthetic biology software tools. These tutorials will combine practical exercises with interactive discussions. A goal of these tutorials will be to bridge the gap between tool developers and experimental biologists, fostering a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities in biodesign automation. These tutorials will provide a unique environment to learn, collaborate, and contribute to the future of reproducible, data-driven synthetic biology.

Keynote Speakers

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Dr. Domitilla Del Vecchio

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Dr. Emma J Chory

Panelists

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Dr. David J. Ross (Fed)

NIST

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Dr. Doug Densmore

Boston University

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Dr. Harrison Steel

University of Oxford

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Dr. Huimin Zhao

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Dr. Mayukh Guha

Lila Sciences

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Will Serber

Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.

Sponsors

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University of Colorado Boulder

Sponsor

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts and workshop proposals must be submitted via EasyChair. Submissions cannot exceed two pages (excluding figures and tables). If you do not have an EasyChair account, please create one by following the instructions specified here.

All abstracts must use the IWBDA template and must not exceed two pages excluding the figures and tables. The following versions of the template are available for use:

All abstracts will undergo a single-blind peer review process on EasyChair. The accepted abstracts will be invited to present their work as a poster or a talk at the conference.

We encourage abstracts for posters and/or talks at IWBDA 2026 on ongoing research that may be submitted as a full journal paper later. We are currently in talks with ACS Synthetic Biology to set up a special issue on bio-design automation for such extended journal submissions. For the full CFP and the latest information, please visit: https://www.iwbdaconf.org

Registration

Agenda

Saturday, June 13, 2026 - IWBDA Tutorials. Location: KOBL 352

  • 08:30-10:00 Session 1
  • 10:00-10:30 Break
  • 10:30-12:00 Session 2
  • 12:00-13:30 Lunch Break
  • 13:30-15:00 Session 3
  • 15:00-15:30 Break
  • 15:30-17:00 Session 4

Sunday, June 14, 2026 - IWBDA Tutorials. Location: KOBL 352

  • 08:30-10:00 Session 5
  • 10:00-10:30 Break
  • 10:30-12:00 Session 6
  • 12:00-12:30 End

Thursday, June 18, 2026 - IWBDA Workshop. Location: KOBL 352

  • 16:00-17:30 Panel Session
  • 17:30 Reception

Friday, June 19, 2026 - IWBDA Workshop. Location: ECCS 201

  • 08:30-09:00 Breakfast

  • 09:00-10:00 Invited Speaker (Carolus Vitalis / William Mo)

  • 10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

  • 10:30-12:00 Design Rules for Programmable Genetic Systems (Lukas Buecherl / Eric Young)

    • 10:30-10:45 Masayuki Yamamura, Rule based generation of synthetic genetic circuits - towards v 3.0
    • 10:45-11:00 Ayush Pandey, Formal specifications for the compositional design of synthetic biological circuits
    • 11:00-11:15 Olivia Gallup and Harrison Steel, Generative models for RNA genetic circuit design identify functional architectures
    • 11:15-11:30 Zoila Jurado, Geoffrey Taghon and Samuel W. Schaffter, Towards interoperable modeling of toehold mediated strand exchange circuits across DNA nanotechnology and engineering biology
    • 11:30-11:45 Zachary Hastings, Zoila Jurado, Bingqing Hu, Zhen Zhang, Samuel W. Schaffter and Lukas Buecherl, Host Aware Design of Cellular ctRSD Circuits
    • 11:45-12:00 Stephen Chiu and Tae Seok Moon, Dynamic control of metabolic flux by RNA based genetic circuits designed, built, and tested through automation

  • 12:00-13:00 Lunch

  • 13:00-14:30 AI, Curation, and Closed Loop Biological Discovery (Zhen Zhang / Martín Gutiérrez)

    • 13:00-13:15 Niloofar Arazkhani and Natasa Miskov Zivanov, BELL: Biomodel Evidence and LLM based Logic
    • 13:15-13:30 Haomiao Luo, Niloofar Arazkhani, Difei Tang and Natasa Miskov Zivanov, VIOLIN WEB: a web application for reconciliation and curation of molecular interaction graphs
    • 13:30-13:45 Jack Dalton, Evolution Co scientists for automated ALE
    • 13:45-14:00 Robin Henry, Harrison Steel and Jean Baptiste Lugagne, Myriad: A GPU Accelerated Platform for In Silico Prototyping of Closed Loop Single Cell Experiments
    • 14:00-14:15 Bryan Tegomoh, AI Powered Genomic Surveillance as Biodesign Automation: Lessons from Operationalizing Pathogen Detection Pipelines at Scale
    • 14:15-14:30 Difei Tang and Natasa Miskov Zivanov, CELESTA Web: An Interactive Tool for LLM Enhanced Biomedical Context Annotation

  • 14:30-15:00 Coffee Break

  • 15:00-16:00 Nona Talks

  • 16:00-17:00 DevCell Discussion

Saturday, June 20, 2026 - IWBDA Workshop. Location: ECCS 201

  • 08:30-09:00 Breakfast

  • 09:00-10:00 Invited Speaker (William Mo / Carolus Vitalis)

  • 10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

  • 10:30-12:00 Predictive Models of Emergent Biochemical Dynamics (Harrison Steel / Brian Munsky)

    • 10:30-10:45 Colin Yancey, EmergeX: A computational framework for designing emergent dynamics in chemical reaction networks
    • 10:45-11:00 Quang Luan Dang Tran, Nguyen H.N. Tran, Derrick Osei and Ania Ariadna Baetica, Performance of Metaheuristic Algorithms in Finding Tradeoffs in One and Two Species Biological Feedback
    • 11:00-11:15 Nguyen Tran, Ania Ariadna Baetica and Samuel Schaffter, Predictive Analysis of Amplification in Biochemical Feedback Circuits
    • 11:15-11:30 Payton Thomas, Johanna Cao, Caleb Wong and Jeff Hasty, Engineered Critical Point Dynamics in Genetic Circuits
    • 11:30-11:45 Zachary Hastings and Lukas Buecherl, Physics Informed Inference of Gene Expression Kinetics Using bioCRNpyler
    • 11:45-12:00 Dimitris Papamichail, Bang Chiem and Georgios Papamichail, Codon Pair Optimization Web Tool

  • 12:00-13:00 Lunch

  • 13:00-14:30 Measurement, Microphysiology, and Living Experimental Platforms (Jeanet Mante / Gonzalo Vidal)

    • 13:00-13:15 Vicente Trelles Fernandez and Harrison Steel, Novel Microfluidic Chips for Massively Parallelised Biological Data Acquisition
    • 13:15-13:30 Nona Hashemi, Mahdi Hasanzadeh Hesar and Samuel M.D. Oliveira, Microfluidic Physics Constrained Agent Based Modeling of Artificial Microbial Biofilms
    • 13:30-13:45 Harman Mehta, Yusuf Ugurluoglu, Meng Zhang, Martyn Dade Robertson and Harrison Steel, Microbial 3D Bioprinter for Novel Living Materials
    • 13:45-14:00 Niall McIntyre and Nick Brooks, Manufacturing a high throughput, label free platform for rapid screening of drug permeation across in vitro plasma membrane models
    • 14:00-14:15 Evan Holbrook, Elizabeth Codd, Ron Weiss and David Kong, TransfectionWizard: An Integrated Open Source Platform for Genetic Circuit Design and Automated Mammalian Cell Liposome Transfection for the Lab and Classroom
    • 14:15-14:30 Radhakrishna Sanka, Akhilesh Maithi, Charan Manikanta and Mani Vashisth, Pegasus: A Distributed Research Platform

  • 14:30-15:00 Coffee Break

  • 15:00-16:15 From Standards to Buildable Biology (David Ross / Tae Seok Moon)

    • 15:00-15:15 Doug Densmore, Chris Krenz, and Guzman Vigliecca, Biodesign Metadata Exchange for Use in Biosecurity
    • 15:15-15:30 Gonzalo Andrés Vidal Peña et al., Standardized Synthetic Biology Data Curation Effort
    • 15:30-15:45 Travis Uhrig and Chris Myers, Adding SBML Modeling Support to SBOLCanvas
    • 15:45-16:00 Jeanet Mante, From Design to Build: Sequence Domestication, Robotic Assembly, and Integrated SBOL Data Capture
    • 16:00-16:15 Sergey Rock Ingram and Lukas Buecherl, Five Cellular Limits for Deployable Synthetic Biology and Design Automation

  • 16:15-16:45 Closing Remarks

Conference Venue

Parking

Visitors to campus may park in hourly pay-to-park lots located throughout campus. Campus pay-to-park lot locations are included on the CU Boulder campus interactive map.

Organizing Committee

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Chris Myers

General Chair

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Aaron Adler

Finance Chair

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Carolus Vitalis

Program Chair

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William Mo

Program Chair

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Daniel Fang

Tutorials Chair

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Gonzalo Vidal

Tutorials Chair

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Hatem Abdelrahman

Tutorials Chair

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Kimberly Low

Arrangements Chair

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Zane Perry

Publication Chair

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Chunxiao Liao

Publicity Chair

Program Committee

Contact Us

Interested in participating, organizing, or sponsoring IWBDA or Bio Innovation Week? Reach out to us for more information on how you can get involved in IWBDA, IWBMA, the Nona Works Hackathon, or SBOL Workshops. We look forward to hearing from you!