Lukasz Bugaj, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Bioengineering 

Lukasz Bugaj is an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering. He earned his BSE in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He then earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering with David Schaffer at Berkeley, where he pioneered some of the first methods for light-activated 'optogenetic' control of mammalian cell signaling. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Wendell Lim at UCSF, where he applied optogenetic technology to uncover functional signaling defects in cancer cells. The Bugaj Lab at Penn combines optogenetics and synthetic biology to understand and engineer biological control, including within therapeutic cells.