Welcome to my website! My name is Salvador Gomez-Carretero. I am a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore working in the field of synthetic biology. I am an engineer in electronics/robotics from University of Sevilla, Spain and I have a PhD from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.
I have always been fascinated by the complexity of life and how can science be used to make some sense of it. Can a living organism be modeled with mathematical equations? To what extent? Is there something else missing? How can this knowledge be used to improve people’s life?
As an engineering student, bacteria quickly got my attention. I see bacteria as one of nature’s more sophisticated micromachines and a paradigm of fine robotic design. This drove me to the field of system biology, modelling how bacteria synchronise and communicate during to infect their host, as well as to study how infections spread from host to host. A particularly delicate situation is bacterial colonization of implanted medical devices, where bacteria form biofilm and become resilient to the action of antibiotics. This motivated me to work on the design of bacterial sensors for the early detection of bacterial colonization.
The prevention of bacterial colonization in medical implants was also the topic of my PhD thesis, where I used electrically conducting polymers to control biofilm formation, studying how electrical signals interact with bacteria and the different bioactive molecules incorporated to the synthesized materials. In addition, I also studied the development of conducting polymer-based bacterial sensors within the medical implant, creating smart devices that react upon the detection of bacterial colonization.
Currently, however, I work on how to use bacteria for beneficial purposes. I work in the field of synthetic biology, in the area of bacterial optogenetics. Optogenetics allows controlling bacterial behavior with simple pulses of light, which has important applications in areas like healthcare, where engineered bacteria could operate like guided microscopic robots to diagnose and treat diseases, and bioproduction, with bacteria modifying their responses to adapt to different stages of the biomanufacturing procedure. In addition, I also work in the field of synthetic biology automation, developing technologies that facilitate the design and construction of biological systems.
In this website you will find information about my research, scientific news that amazed me and, in general, whatever comes up. I hope you enjoy it!
Feel free to contact me at salvagc@gmail.com.