Programming the formation of synthetic tissues
Wendell Lim - University of California, San Francisco and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States of America

Building tissues to understand how tissues build themselves
Zev Gartner - University of California San Francisco, United States of America

Building the human embryo in vitro: one step at a time
Marta Shahbazi - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Coffee Break and Meet the Speakers

Synthetic cellularity
Dora Tang - Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany

Blue light switchable cell-cell interactions provide reversible and spatiotemporal control towards bottom-up tissue engineering
Seraphine Wegner - Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Germany

Making. Tissues. Function. How simple is complex enough?
Christopher Chen - Boston University, United States of America

Coffee Break

Theoretical tool bridging cell polarities with development of robust morphologies
Silas Boye Nissen - University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Changes in gene expression shift and switch genetic interactions
Xianghua Li - Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain

Morphogenesis in evolved systems
Buzz Baum - University College London, United Kingdom

Dinner in EMBL Canteen

Reconstituting morphogen gradients to understand pathway architecture
Michael Elowitz - California Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States of America

Coordination of progenitor specification and growth in the developing spinal cord
Anna Kicheva - Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Austria

Pattern formation by multi-species bacterial colonies with programmed population-to-population interactions
Jiandong Huang - The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Coffee Break and Meet the Editors

From circuits to organs: towards a dynamic computer simulation of limb development
James Sharpe - EMBL Barcelona, Spain

Talk title to be announced
Darren Gilmour - University of Zurich, Switzerland

Session 3 - Gene expression dynamics/Gene circuits
Chair: Wendell Lim

Engineered gene circuits: from clocks to synchronized delivery
Jeff Hasty - University of California, San Diego, United States of America

Visualizing morphogen shuttling in the early Drosophila embryo
Naama Barkai - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

An ab-initio derivation of the Drosophila gap gene system from an optimization principle
Thomas Sokolowski - Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Austria

Coffee Break

Decoding development: from gene regulatory structure to function
Justin Crocker - EMBL Heidelberg, Germany

Coupling gene circuits through tissue polarity to achieve adaptive tissue responses
Veronica Grieneisen - Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Flash Talks Session I

Dinner in the EMBL Canteen

The genetic blueprint of the mammalian embryo: a synthetic approach
Alfonso Martinez Arias - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Blastoids: blastocyst-like structures generated solely from stem cells
Nicolas Rivron - Hubrecht Institute and MERLN, The Netherlands

Coffee Break and Meet the Editors

Dissecting human-specific brain development by studying single cell expression dynamics of great ape cerebral organoids
Sabina Kanton - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

Human time vs. mouse time with in vitro segmentation clock
Miki Ebisuya - EMBL Barcelona, Spain and RIKEN BDR, Japan 

Session 5 - Mechanics
Chair: Veronica Grieneisen

Energy dissipation by molecular motors
Manuel Théry - Hopital Saint Louis, France

Topological transitions of epithelial surfaces
Keisuke Ishihara - Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany

Sequential bottom-up assembly of synthetic cells
Joachim Spatz - Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Germany

Coffee Break

Assembly of lung progenitors into developmentally-relevant tube structures drives differentiation patterning via cellular tension
Alison McGuigan - University of Toronto, Canada

Endogenous bioelectric circuits: morphological computation in real and synthetic organisms 
Michael Levin - Tufts University, United States of America

Flash Talks Session II 

Poster Session II
with beer and snacks

Optogenetic-guided tissue morphogenesis
Stefano De Renzis - EMBL Heidelberg, Germany

Circuits and devices for real-time control of cellular systems
Mustafa Khammash - ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Thermal activation of gene expression in 3D printed tissues
Daniel Corbett - University of Washington, United States of America

Coffee Break and Meet the Speakers

ESC differentiation on micro-patterned subtrate to study Antero-Posterior axis formation in mouse and human
Benoit Sorre - Université Paris Diderot, France

Engineering tissue architecture through microfabrication and polymer engineering
Milica Radisic - University of Toronto, Canada

Packed Lunch and Departure