Champions of Change
A bioengineer at Stanford, Drew Endy is also co-founder and President of BioBricks.org, a charity advancing biotechnology to benefit all people and the planet. Over the past decade, Dr. Endy has provided early leadership and support for many open biotechnology programs including iGEM.org, a competition enabling over 10,000 students to explore biotechnology, OpenWetWare.org, a resource for sharing lab methods and results used by thousands of researchers, and BIOFAB.org, a public-domain factory for engineering high-quality standard biological parts. Dr. Endy and the BioBricks team underwrite an open technical standards-setting process for synthetic biology and, most recently, have developed the BioBrick Public Agreement (BPA) as a legal contract for making genetic materials free to share and use. His research teams have made many initial BPA contributions and encourage everyone to work together in growing a public domain "operating system" for engineering biology.