John McCaskill

Timeline

1. 1957–1982

   Rhodes Scholar at Oxford

   Born in Sydney in 1957, he studies chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Universities of Sydney and Oxford. He graduates from Sydney University in 1978 under advisor R. G. Gilbert and completes a D.Phil. in 1982 as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford.

2. 1987–1992

   Evolution with Manfred Eigen

   From 1987, he leads a research group in evolutionary self-organization affiliated with Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen's department at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. In 1990, he publishes a method for the equilibrium partition function and base-pair binding probabilities of RNA secondary structure, an ensemble approach to RNA folding now in wide use.

3. 1992–1999

   Professor in Jena

   He becomes full professor of theoretical biochemistry at the University of Jena in 1992 and founds the first Department for Molecular Information Processing at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology. His Jena group builds spatially resolved molecular information systems with simulation, microfluidics and reconfigurable electronics, and in 1997 he contributes “VLSE: Very Large Scale Evolution in Hardware” to the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life.

4. 1999–2004

   BioMIP at the GMD

   In 1999, he moves his group to the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Sankt Augustin near Bonn as Biomolecular Information Processing (BioMIP). In 2000, he co-edits Artificial Life VII, the MIT Press proceedings of the seventh international conference on artificial life, with Mark A. Bedau, Norman H. Packard and Steen Rasmussen. From 2000, he develops a chemical microprocessor technology for electronically programmable matter via microscale electrochemistry.

5. 2004–2008

   Coordinating the PACE project

   He coordinates PACE (Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution), a 2004–2008 EU project with 16 partners and one of the earliest bottom-up efforts to create an artificial living cell, and moves BioMIP to the Ruhr University Bochum in 2004. In 2005, the PACE consortium establishes the European Centre for Living Technology in Venice, with McCaskill among its founding directors.

6. 2009–2018

   MICREAgents and lablets in Bochum

   In 2009, BioMIP moves to labs on the Ruhr University Bochum campus, where it runs until 2017 in the Faculty of Chemistry and Biochemistry and coordinates the EU projects ECCell and MICREAgents. In 2012, MICREAgents wins first place in an EU call on unconventional computing and receives 3.4 million euros to build lablets, self-assembling electronic microreagents almost as small as cells. In 2018, he prepares a scientific and technical roadmap for nanorobotic surgery for the University of Sydney.

7. 2022–2025

   Smartlets at TU Chemnitz

   He joins the Research Center MAIN at TU Chemnitz in August 2022, and in 2023, as a founding director and science board member of the European Centre for Living Technology, he welcomes TU Chemnitz into the ECLT network. In 2025, he is a co-corresponding author of a Science Robotics paper on smartlets, millimeter-sized microrobots that communicate by light and carry lablet chiplets from an EU project he led.

8. As of October 2026

   Microelectronic Biosystems group leader

   As of October 2026, he leads the Microelectronic Biosystems research group at TU Chemnitz's Research Center MAIN.