KAREN INGRAM is a designer, artist and creative director who uses her skill set to promote scientific awareness. Ingram recently completed visuals as a co-author of Biobuilder (O’Reilly), a synthetic biology curriculum. She is a co-organizer of Brooklyn science cabaret, The Empiricist League, and is a programming committee member of SXSW Interactive. She is an instructor on the subject of creative strategy for NYU SHERP’s Entrepreneurial Science Journalism course. Her work has appeared in many publications including titles from Die Gestalten (Berlin), Scientific American, and The FWA, where she was named a “Digital Pioneer.” As a 2015 Synthetic Biology LEAP (Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program) fellow, Karen is recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology.

Thomas Landrain is co-founder and president of La Paillasse, the first french and world largest community lab that fosters open science and technology. He claims that there is no monopole for great ideas and has been working on re-founding the concept of science laboratory for the upcoming era of collective intelligence, fast prototyping and big data. He first did a career in academia after graduating in Genetics from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and co-founded the first french synthetic biology lab at Genopole where he did his PhD. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the young startup PILI that created the first renewable and safe inks to be biologically synthesised by bacteria. Thomas is a strong advocate of open science and one of the most prominent spokesman for biohacking/DIYbio, travelling the world as a speaker to share his visions and thoughts on the upcoming open biotech revolution. Thomas is also a mentor for Indiebio, one of the world's first accelerator programs for new age synthetic biology start-ups.
Today, La Paillasse has grown into an international network of laboratories with all necessary ressources to conduct prototyping and R&D projects, available to any person wishing to use it. It attracts a large number of budding biologists, physicists, engineers, designers and artists. The last Open Science program launched by La Paillasse is Epidemium, in partnership with Roche Laboratories. Epidemium is an ambitious scientific program tailored for collaborative research that seeks to transform the way we perform cancer epidemiology studies by using only shared and open data.