The Future of Lab Automation & AI: A Talk with Ginkgo, Potato, and Tetsuwan
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence & robotics has delivered a renewed hope that lab automation may be able finally expand past the high-volume, low-variety workflows it has remained restricted to, and at long last, bring an end to the tyranny of the manual pipette. The gaze of world governments (U.S. & Genesis Mission, UK & ARIA, Canada & Acceleration Consortium) and the technology giants of Silicon Valley (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) has fallen onto automated science. This is an exciting and surely, pivotal, time for the field. But what does the future actually hold for lab automation? How does our field move forward from here? What has to happen, and who is going to do it? Does the process of research itself stand on the precipice of a paradigm shift?
Join the Bay Area's community linchpin, Luis Villa, for a conversation with three companies working at the frontier of automation on the evening of February 10th, as well as food and drinks, all in Ginkgo's beautiful event space.
Tours of Ginkgo's 50-robot autonomous lab will be offered to attendees of the panel. Two batches of tours will depart at 7 & 7:30PM. Food and drinks will also be available. Thank you to Ginkgo Bioworks for hosting! Please note that the Google Maps image of the address is outdated. An image of what the venue looks like is attached at this link.
About Luis Villa & Bay Area Lab Automators: Luis Villa is a staff automation engineer at Cellares and co-founder of Bay Area Lab Automators. Bay Area Lab Automators is a community of scientists, engineers, and tinkerers working at the intersection of hardware, software, and lab innovation.
About Potato: Potato is building AI scientists for closed-loop optimization of experiments. Potato will be represented by its CEO, Dr. Nick Edwards.
About Tetsuwan: Tetsuwan is solving how scientists and models interface with lab automation, in pursuit of developing the cloud laboratory. Tetsuwan will be represented by its cofounder, Alexandra Rolfness.
About Ginkgo: Ginkgo Bioworks pioneered the autonomous lab and recently was selected to deliver a 97 robot autonomous lab for the DOE as part of the Genesis Mission to bring AI into US science. Built by scientists and engineers who understand the complexities of biology, Ginkgo’s integrated hardware and AI-driven software solutions enable true closed-loop science—removing the bottleneck of manual lab work. Modular systems scale from one robot to many, with over-the-air updates continuously advancing each workcell toward full laboratory autonomy. Gingko will be represented by Dr. Jennifer Fredlund, Senior Director of Automation.