Andrew Pelling Spiderwort

Award winning Scientist, Professor, Entrepreneur, TED Senior Fellow and TED Speaker, Andrew Pelling has built a career on unapologetic curiosity. Andrew is a Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, where his research lab brings together scientists, engineers and artists to explore speculative living technologies of the future with low-cost materials and methods. For instance, the lab created body parts made from plants and has grown living skins on LEGOs – innovations with the potential to redefine the limits of biology. Andrew is the co-founder and CSO of Spiderwort, a company dedicated to developing plant-based biomaterials for repairing and regenerating the human body. He also co-founded pHacktory, a street-level research lab that amplifies community ideas through a potent mixture of craft, serendipity and curiosity. Andrew’s work has been well covered by the media, in outlets such as Wired, Motherboard, The Atlantic, Scientific American, BBC and the Discovery Channel. Andrew’s thought leadership and experience is highly sought-after and he travels extensively for numerous speaking engagements. He also serves in a variety of advisory roles at other organizations, for example, Chief Scientist at the Creative Destruction Labs (Canada), advisory board member for the Max Planck Institute Artist Residency Program (Germany), editorial board member at three peer-reviewed scientific journals (UK) and many others.

Photo by Colin Rowe