In this talk I will give an overview of some of our research activities in the "Control Engineering Synthetic Biology" group, where we focus our efforts on developing foundational forward-engineering methods to mathematically model, control, and experimentally implement synthetic gene circuits and cellular systems that aim at increasing the robustness, performance, and genetic stability of engineered cells. During the talk, I will propose some approaches to answer some of the following questions in systems and synthetic biology: How can we use cellular resources more efficiently to simultaneously improve growth rates and production yields? What is the interplay between feedback and buffering in cellular homeostasis? How can we create genetic oscillators for which the amplitude and period of oscillations can be tuned independently?