Jan is a co-founder of Biotic and a PhD student in physics at the Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on reconstituting life-like processes under controlled conditions, particularly information processing in molecular communication networks, and on engineering life-like materials that can sense, compute, and act. His path to synthetic biology ran through the European Space Agency and German Aerospace Center, where he worked on biological mining methods for Martian and Lunar regolith, and through the Max Planck School Matter to Life, where he completed his MSc in Molecular Systems Engineering at Heidelberg University. Earlier, he studied neurobiology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Jan is an OSV Fellow and a Renaissance Philanthropy BiTS x SPRIND Fellow, where he received mentoring from DARPA Program Managers on designing coordinated research programs.