Angela Belcher and her Biomolecular Materials Group at MIT use "advanced bioengineering techniques to explore the interface between inorganic and organic materials for applications to energy, medicine, electronics, nanomechanics, and the environment.

In other words, she turns living cells into tiny factories. And, she’ll be talking about it today on NPR’s Science Friday.

We are evolving simple organisms using directed evolution to work with the elements in the rest of the periodic table. We encourage these organisms to grow and assemble technologically important materials and devices for energy, the environment, and medicine. These hybrid organic-inorganic electronic and magnetic materials have been used in applications as varied as solar cells, batteries, medical diagnostics and basic single molecule interactions related to disease. In doing so, we have capitalized on many of the wonderful properties of biology-using only non-toxic materials, employing self-repair mechanisms, self-assembling precisely and over longer ranges, and adapting and evolving to become better over time.

Here’s she is from a talk earlier this year at Women of MIT symposium.

(We’re working on a technical issues, but If the video does not appear below, try using Internet Explorer.)