Léo Pio-Lopez

Léo Pio-Lopez is a researcher at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, where he works on the computational side of the lab’s bioelectricity programme. His ORCID record shows developmental biology and gene regulation as his dominant topics, with morphogenesis simulation as the recurring tool.

His recent work argues that niche construction, the way agents reshape the microenvironments that then reshape them, applies far beyond ecology. In the September 2026 preprint “Scale-free Niche Construction” with Patrick McMillen, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Michael Levin (OSF, doi:10.31219/osf.io/ytg35_v3), he extends the idea to unconventional substrates and shows wetlab evidence for active stigmergy, where cells leave dynamic, bioelectrically active components in their surroundings that later guide behavior. The environment becomes a writable memory the agent both writes to and reads from.

For the study of emerging consciousness, the move is structural. If part of an agent’s cognition lives in a medium outside its body, then the boundary of the agent is not its membrane but its loop of reciprocal modification with the world. Any account of consciousness as an emergent property of organization rather than tissue gains a concrete mechanism here, and so does the harder question of where an artificial agent ends and its scaffold begins.

Known for. Active bioelectric stigmergy, morphogenesis simulation, scale-free niche construction

Coverage on this site

• Active Bioelectric Stigmergy and Scale-Free Niche Construction in Pio-Lopez and Levin's 2026 Preprint October 2026

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Léo Pio-Lopez is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.