Michael Levin

Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist, distinguished professor at Tufts University, where he directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His work concerns bioelectric signaling and the control of large-scale anatomical form in living systems.

Bioelectricity and pattern regulation

Levin’s laboratory studies how ion fluxes and voltage gradients across cell membranes encode pattern information during development and regeneration, and how decoding or re-specifying this bioelectric information can trigger the regrowth of complex structures — including eyes, limbs and, in planarian flatworms, whole-body patterns that persist after intervention at the genomic, cellular or