Julie Legault

Location
Canada

Expert Bio

Julie Legault is a Montreal-based designer-entrepreneur and founder of Amino Labs, an MIT spinout dedicated to making genetic engineering accessible to non-scientists and children through hands-on learning experiences. Holding a B.F.A. in Design and Computation Art from Concordia University, a Master of Art from the Royal College of Art in London, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab, Julie brings a rare interdisciplinary expertise that bridges cutting-edge technology and accessible design. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with globally recognized brands and artists, including Rihanna and Imogen Heap, creating smart materials, wearable technology, and interactive art that have been featured in Wired Magazine, The New York Times, MoMA, ARS Electronica, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. As co-author of Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero, a fellow of the Coaching Fellowship program for remarkable young women leaders of impact, and a recognized I.D.E.A.L. Bioscience employer, Julie is committed to driving cultural change by transforming complex scientific and technological concepts into transformative, human-centered experiences and products.

Sessions

The DNA Cooking Show: Programming Life, Live

In this stage segment, participants will watch a genetic transformation begin in real time and discover why programming biology cannot be treated like programming software.

Genetic engineering is argued about constantly and witnessed almost never. So we describe it through a convenient metaphor: DNA is code and cells are computers. But writing the instruction is not the same as getting the result. A cell may not take in the DNA, may not produce the expected change, or may behave differently under different conditions. In biology, the result takes time and has to be observed, tested, and interpreted.

Julie Legault will play the cook rather than the lab lecturer, working through a beginner-friendly bacterial transformation with a host who asks what the room is thinking: Is E.coli dangerous? What is a DNA program? Has anything changed yet? Because cells keep their own schedule, the pair will begin a transformation onstage and reveal a vivid violet result prepared the day before. This borrowed cooking-show device will make biological time visible rather than editing it out.

The segment will suit plenary audiences too large for hands-on work, including executives, investors, policymakers, and others who may shape biotechnology without ever seeing its processes firsthand. They will leave having watched something alive do something new, an experience stranger and better than simply being told that it can.

When Biology Leaves the Lab

In this session, participants will learn to spot when a biological capability is beginning to leave specialist settings, the window in which it becomes affordable, teachable, and

available to people outside the field.

The headline moment is rarely the moment that matters. A result will often be announced years before it changes anything, and the change arrives later, quietly: equipment shrinks, protocols become teachable, price falls, and people outside the original field begin experimenting, investing, worrying, regulating, or imagining new uses. That second moment is harder to see because nobody announces it. There is no press release for something becoming easy.

Drawing on a decade spent translating laboratory procedures into guided tools and experiences that teenagers can use outside a traditional laboratory, Julie Legault will introduce a Signal–Sign–Shift frame: a signal shows what is possible, a sign appears when it becomes repeatable or affordable, and a shift begins when it spreads into new sectors. Participants will assess a curated set of cases, apply the framework to their own sectors, and use a Futures Wheel to map second- and third-order effects.

This session will suit people who have to act before the picture is complete: investors, strategists, R&D leads, and workforce planners. They will leave with a practical framework for recognizing evidence that a capability is moving beyond the lab and anticipating the questions that may follow.

Biology Belongs to Everyone

In this session, participants will learn how to take part in the biological decisions already being made around them — about food, health, materials, and medicine — without needing a science degree to earn a seat at the table.

Bio-literacy will not mean turning everyone into a scientist. It will mean enough understanding to ask a good question, judge a claim, choose, refuse, and help shape what comes next. AI has made biological language and design far easier to reach; anyone can now get a fluent answer about CRISPR, or a plausible-looking DNA design, in seconds. But easier answers do not produce judgment, and they do not tell you whether the decision is yours alone to make. The gap between access and agency is getting wider, not narrower.

Julie Legault came to biology as a designer, not a researcher. She will draw on that route, and on years of putting laboratory tools into the hands of teachers, teenagers, and curious adults at Amino Labs, to show where the real barriers sit: language, cost, permission, and belonging. Participants will map where biotechnology already touches an ordinary week, then separate three things that are easy to confuse: receiving information, using a tool, and having genuine agency.

This session will suit people whose decisions land on others: curriculum choices, funding decisions, policy, hiring, product design, or public communication. They will leave better able to distinguish the questions that require technical expertise, the questions that require public judgment, and the questions that demand both.

Biotechnology by Hand

In this workshop, participants will run the core steps of a genetic engineering experiment themselves, and leave knowing what the work actually involves rather than what headlines suggest.

For most people, biotechnology exists only as headlines, diagrams, and arguments. That distance makes it feel like magic or like a threat, and both readings make it harder to think clearly about. Doing the work is the fastest correction: it is slower, more ordinary, and more dependent on judgment than either version suggests.

Participants will learn to use a micropipette, read a simple DNA design, and introduce that DNA into a non-pathogenic educational microorganism. They will then compare their work with prepared positive and negative controls showing what successful transformation looks like after incubation. Julie Legault learned this in a kitchen workshop before helping build the kits that bring it into rooms without laboratories, and she will teach it the way she needed it taught. A closing discussion will move from ‘Can we do this?’ to ‘Who should do it, under what conditions, and how should the results be interpreted?

The workshop will suit people who write and decide about biotechnology without having done it: journalists, educators, innovation teams, and executive cohorts. They will leave able to say from experience which parts of the process are easy, which are hard, and which deserve genuine caution.

Biotechnology & You

Biotechnology is going through a rapid evolution as it moves from the lab into our bodies and even to our kitchen tables. Since its digitization in the early 2000s, biotechnology has exploded into a playing field that now welcomes designers, entrepreneurs, artists, and even teenagers who are all learning, building and innovating with the building blocks of life.

As the science becomes democratized, it is already starting to reshape traditional industries, economies, and even what it means to be human. In this unfolding biological world, we all have a role to play because what we do right now will affect everything that comes after us.

In this talk:

•Participants will gain an understanding of emerging democratized biotechnologies projects which will help them better forecast how the rapidly evolving field of biotechnology/digital biology will impact them, their families, industries, and humanity.

•Participants will understand how accessible it can be to learn and do biotechnology outside of traditional institutions.

•Participants will understand the pressing need to learn about digital biology/biotechnology.

•Participants will be able to explain some ethical and moral issues surrounding digital biology/biotechnology and its democratization.

•Participants will be able to identify opportunities for engagement with digital biology/biotechnology.

Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero - Hands-on genetic engineering.

Discover the Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero workshop and unlock the potential of biotechnology! Join me on an inventive journey of hands-on experimentation and learn to see the future of this revolutionary field. Let us show you the extraordinary power and possibilities of genetic engineering, and leave with newfound knowledge and skills. With unprecedented access to powerful tools, you can be a real agent of change! Are you ready to shape the future?

This is a 3-hour Hands-on workshop or 2x 1.5-hour hands-on workshops. No prior biotechnology experience or laboratory experience is required. No lab space required—these activities can be done in any room.

By the end of the workshop:

• Participants will be able to explain some ethical and moral issues surrounding digital biology/biotechnology and its democratization.

• Participants will be able to identify opportunities for engagement with digital biology/biotechnology.

Participants will have genetically engineered living organisms

Expert Bio

Sessions

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