Dear friends of UVM,
At UVM, groundbreaking research is integral to the way our scholars and scientists educate students, engage with the broader community, and shape the future. Philanthropic investment creates opportunities for brilliant minds to explore and accelerates cutting-edge innovation, with applications and implications around the globe. With that in mind, last January UVM launched SOLVE, an unprecedented fundraising campaign to support a wave of research projects aimed at creating a future of healthy societies and a healthy environment.
The SOLVE Campaign represents a broad spectrum of research across all academic disciplines, from the sciences to the arts and humanities. Your support makes all manner of inquiry and investigation possible for our faculty and students. And as you’ll read here, whether it’s preserving pollinators, quantifying happiness, or translating fairy tales, UVM is bringing its discoveries to the world, thanks to you.
You need look no further than the image below to find yourself at the leading edge of what is possible in the field of robotics: novel, self-replicating life forms called Xenobots. Professor Josh Bongard and his research team have garnered worldwide media attention with their discovery, which could have wide-ranging applications from fighting cancer to cleaning up the environment. At UVM, the future is now!
Whatever your connection to UVM, you can be proud of the work being done here, work that will touch your life in some way. And you can be proud of the role you play in helping to create a better world for us all—thank you. With gratitude,
Monica Delisa, Ed.D.
President and CEO
The UVM Foundation
Monica Delisa, Ed.D.
President and CEO
The UVM Foundation
Scientists at UVM, Tufts, and Harvard have built the world’s first living robots that can reproduce, called Xenobots. Made from frog cells, these computer-designed organisms gather single cells inside a Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—and release Xenobot “babies” that look and move like themselves.
“This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it,” says Joshua Bongard, the Cyril G. Veinott Green and Gold Professor of Computer Science and a robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.
Bongard points to the COVID-19 epidemic and the hunt for a vaccine. “The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI, ‘We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,’ —that could be very beneficial.”
The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions—”like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines,” Bongard says. “We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face.”
Scientists at UVM, Tufts, and Harvard have built the world’s first living robots that can reproduce, called Xenobots. Made from frog cells, these computer-designed organisms gather single cells inside a Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—and release Xenobot “babies” that look and move like themselves.
“This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it,” says Joshua Bongard, the Cyril G. Veinott Green and Gold Professor of Computer Science and a robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.
Bongard points to the COVID-19 epidemic and the hunt for a vaccine. “The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI, ‘We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,’ —that could be very beneficial.”
The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions—”like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines,” Bongard says. “We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face.”