Newsroom
News & updates
Lab updates, papers, awards, and events.
Chemla Lab website launched
Welcome to the new Chemla Lab website! Pages and resources will grow as the lab prepares to open at UC Santa Barbara in March 2027.
New paper: Responsible biotechnology — analyzing the Asilomar 2025 entreaties
A new Feature Review with Christopher Voigt is out in Trends in Biotechnology — "Responsible biotechnology: an analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties." Fifty years after the original Asilomar meeting, it synthesizes the 27 Spirit of Asilomar 2025 entreaties into concrete action items on the environmental release of engineered organisms, biosecurity, AI in the biosciences, education, governance, and regulation.
It's official — joining UC Santa Barbara Bioengineering
Yonatan has officially accepted a faculty position in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara. The Chemla Lab opens March 1, 2027, and is recruiting its founding members now.
On the podcast with Niko McCarty: seeing microbes from the sky
Yonatan joined science writer Niko McCarty — founding editor of Asimov Press and one of the clearest, most thoughtful voices in synthetic biology — for a wide-ranging conversation on hyperspectral biology and reading engineered microbes from drones and satellites. A genuinely fun discussion; thank you, Niko!
Q&A with UCSB Bioengineering
UC Santa Barbara's College of Engineering published a Q&A introducing Yonatan as an incoming Assistant Professor of Bioengineering — on taking biology from the test tube to the landscape, and what the new lab will build.