Past Member

Helene Steiner

Former Research Assistant
  • Tangible Media

Helene Steiner is the co-founder and CEO of OpenCell. OpenCell builds modular biotech labs with the mission to bring down the barriers to entry of biotechnology. OpenCell has bootstrapped a we-work for biotechnology, giving startups access to hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment for hundreds of pounds a month. During the pandemic, she has built and deployed rapid-response diagnostic labs using OpenCells' custom BSL2 container labs and processed over half a million COVID qPCR tests.

Helene was previously a postdoc researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and has been hosted as a visiting researcher in the Tangible Media group of the MIT Media Lab. She has been awarded a Frontier of Science, Kavli Fellowship by the National Academy of Sciences, and is a member of the SynBio IRC Steering Committee at Cambridge University.