Open Bio Labs

Open Bio Labs is Charlottesville's Education and Entrepreneurship laboratory. As an alternative to industrial and academic research, we put the citizen back into science! While our focus is on synthetic biology and biotechnology, our interests are as diverse as those of our members! Our philosophy is segmented into the three pillars of our company: Learn, Build, Grow. In Learn, students of all ages (K-12 and Adult learners) learn about biology and biotechnology, as well as specific laboratory techniques and general good practices for being a scientist and researcher. The goal of the Learn program is to transition the students into the Build program. In Build, the mode of instruction is flipped on it's head from learn, where a bottom-up instead of a top-down learning methodology is used. This means that the students/members explore their own scientific curiosities and design their own experiments, with our frameworks and mentors in place to help them where they need it. And if their experiments begin to show promise, members can transition into the Grow program. In Grow, our goal is to help transition projects into the real world, whether that is the development of an actual company, the publication of papers and/or patents, or even solving community and personal problems. Our network of talent is ready-on-hand to help your project grow!