Jane Calvert, a sociologist of science, is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator grant, focuses on attempts to engineer living things in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which raises intriguing questions about design, evolution and ‘life’. She is interested the governance of emerging technologies, intellectual property and open source, and interdisciplinary collaborations of all sorts. She was a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Working Party on Synthetic Biology, the UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap Coordination Group, and the Nuffield Council of Bioethics Working Party on Emerging Biotechnologies. She is currently a member of the UK BBSRC’s BioScience and Society Strategy Panel. She is a co-author of the interdisciplinary book Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature, published by MIT Press in 2014.