Murugan Lab
- mvantongeren@uchicago.edu
Background
Mats van Tongeren joined the JFI in February 2026 as a Center for Living Systems postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Arvind Murugan. He received his MSc. in Nanobiology at the Delft University of Technology, where he developed an integrated system for combining lipid synthesis and DNA replication inside liposomes with Dr. Chritophe Danelon. In 2025, Mats received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from ESPCI - Paris, supervised by Dr. Yannick Rondelez and Dr. Olivier Rivoire. During his Ph.D., Mats worked on quantitative self-selection for enzyme engineering. Mats' research spans a large interdisciplinary space, including microfluidic experiments and applied statistical mechanics.
Research
As a member of the Murugan Lab at the University of Chicago, Mats is currently developing experimental systems to implement physical learning using the toolkit of synthetic biology.