Dr Kevin M. Esvelt is an assistant professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge (Massachusetts), where he currently leads the Sculpting Evolution Group that explores evolutionary and ecological engineering. Together with the communities of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, his group is advancing the “Mice Against Ticks” project, which aims to prevent tick-borne diseases by releasing engineered heritably immune mice.

In 2013, Dr Esvelt was the first to describe how the CRISPR-Cas technology could be used to build gene drive systems and alter wild populations.

Recognizing the implications of a technology that could enable individual scientists to alter the shared environment, he is an outspoken advocate of freely sharing research plans to accelerate discovery and improve safety and to openly discuss probable consequences of CRISPR-based gene drives before demonstration in the laboratory. Dr Esvelt is further committed to develop safeguards for gene drives. These include so called “daisy drives” that should only spread locally as well as ways to restore populations to their original genetics.

Dr Esvelt received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic ecosystem capable of continuously and autonomously directing the evolution of useful biomolecules. He subsequently worked under the advisory of George M Church at the Wyss institute where he helped develop the CRISPR system.

A Fellow of the Fannie & John Hertz Foundation, Dr. Esvelt is a recipient of the Marsilius Medal and Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (TR35) Award.

His work is frequently published in top scientific journals, including Nature and Science, and covered in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, PBS NOVA and NPR.

Selected publications

Noble, C., Adlam, B., Church, G.M., Esvelt, K.M., Nowak, M.A. (2018). Current CRISPR gene drive systems are likely to be highly invasive in wild populations. eLife, e33423.

Esvelt, K.M. (2016). Gene editing can drive science to openness. Nature, 534(153). doi: 0.1038/534153a.

Esvelt, K.M., Smidler, A.L., Catteruccia, F., Church, G.M. (2014). Concerning RNA- guided gene drives for the alteration of wild populations. eLife, e03401. doi: 10.7554/eLife.03401.

Esvelt, K.M., Carlson, J.C., Liu, D.R. (2011). A system for the continuous directed evolution of biomolecules. Nature, 472:499-503.
doi: 10.1038/nature09929.

Mali, P., Yang, L., Esvelt, K.M., Aach, J., Guell, M., DiCarlo, J.E., Norville, J.E., Church, G.M. (2013). RNA-guided human genome engineering via Cas9. Science, 339:823-6. Doi: 10.1126/science.1232033.