MIT’s Under 35 List of Innovators Includes Inventors, Entrepreneurs, Visionaries, Humanitarians, and Pioneers

June 21, 2020 – It is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and Winter Solstice on the planet’s opposite side. In Toronto when I walked my dog last night, the sky remained light past 9:30 p.m. These are the evenings I cherish each year when daylight persists for more than 16 hours in the mid-latitudes. I always feel hopeful in these mid to late June evenings and mornings. Today is also Father’s Day and my wife’s birthday. So we can celebrate a trifecta.

Being hopeful in the midst of a pandemic is a nice feeling. It’s not just being hopeful about the return of summer, but also because I have been reading about the under 35 young people who this year have been selected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the coolest, nerdiest people on the planet.

Every year for the past 20, MIT has held a contest in which editors of the MIT Technology Review, along with other judges select from a field of hundreds, the top 35 under the age of 35 who are bringing new knowledge, innovation, and assistance to the planet and humanity covering artificial intelligence, biotechnology, software development, energy initiatives, new materials, and more.

This year’s category of Inventors includes:

• Omar Abudayyeh, age 30, who is working with CRISPR to develop a genetic home test to spot COVID-19.
• Christina Boville, age 32, cofounder of Aralez Bio, who is designing processes to improve on how biology controls chemical reactions to accelerate development of new medications.
• Manuel Le Gallo, age 34, who with his team at IBM is developing AI software that processes data using a fraction of the processing and energy of conventional computing systems.
• Nadya Peek, age 34, who is building modular components and machine assemblies that can be programmed to do almost anything.
• Leila Pirhaji, age 34, CEO of ReviveMed, has developed an AI machine learning platform focused on treatment of liver, immune, inflammatory and other diseases by understanding the interaction of proteins and other molecules associated with these conditions.
• Randall Jeffrey Platt, age 32, has invented a method of recording molecular events within cells over time in real-time.
• Rebecca Saive, age 33, who has found a way to improve on the performance of solar photovoltaics to make solar panels cheaper and more energy-efficient.
• Venkat Viswanathan, age 34, who is working with pure lithium and polymer-ceramic separators in electric batteries to deliver more power per weight than the ones being used in electric vehicles today.
• Anastasia Volkova, age 28, who is combining remote sensing and scientific modeling of collected data to help farmers improve crop yields.
• Sihong Wang, age 33, who has created stretchable and bendable microchips that perform as well as those etched into silicon using a polymer substrate for a wide variety of applications from skin patches to nanogenerators that can be placed in the body without requiring an external power source.

In the category Entrepreneurs, MIT recognizes:

• Jiwei Li, age 31, who has developed AI-chatbots who he has licensed to Google and Facebook. The chatbot uses neural networks, natural-language processing, and deep reinforcement learning to create near Turing-Test-passing conversations with human callers.
• Atima Lui, age 30, who is using an AI app called Nudemeter for applying makeup to different shades of skin overcoming the cosmetic industry’s bias toward lighter pigment.
• Tony Pan, age 34, CEO of Modern Electron, has taken a 1950 invention, the heat engine, and turned it into a thermionic converter to convert furnaces and boilers used for home heating into mini residential power plants for generating electricity.

In the Visionaries category we have:

• Leilani Battle, age 31, who has developed a program called ForeCache, to scan visual datasets such as high-resolution satellite images to spot anomalies and quirks and for doing predictions, analysis, and planning.
• Morgan Beller, age 27, who has been the digital currency evangelist for Facebook’s Libra and the use of open-source blockchain infrastructure and digital wallets.
• Eimear Dolan, age 32, a biomedical engineer who has developed a small robotic device called a dynamic soft reservoir that improves the performance of implanted devices to protect them from our natural foreign body response which can cause implants like pacemakers and insulin delivery systems to fail.
• Rose Faghih, age 34, who is developing a smartwatch algorithm that can analyze imperceptible changes in skin sweat activity to detect changes in mental state such as agitation, PTSD, and others, as well as the detection of medical conditions such as low blood sugar to trigger an insulin pump response.
• Bo Li, age 32, who has developed “adversarial attacks” on AI-based systems to make them safer for use in autonomous vehicles, or in IBM’s Watson AI, and Amazon’s Alexa.
• Zlatko Minev, age 30, whose work at IBM has solved problems in quantum physics that even challenged Einstein  and Niels Bohr. His experiments focus on quantum computing to detect and reduce error rates caused by quantum jumps to make these devices more reliable for cracking encryption, modeling chemical reactions, and forecasting the weather.
• Miguel Modestino, age 34, whose work with the chemical industry using AI to reduce its overall carbon footprint has led to the founding of Sunthetics, a company that uses complex pulses of electricity in production processes that use less energy, produce better yields, and less waste.
• Inioluwa Deborah Raji, age 24, whose work in AI ethics has revealed gender and racial biases in facial recognition software and led to the development of standards and documentation for algorithmic accountability. Her standards have become the framework for facial recognition in the Google Cloud and on OpenAI platforms.
• Adriana Schulz, age 34, is currently starting the Center for Digital Fabrication at the University of Washington based the software tools she has developed for the building of robots, drones, and other machines incorporating materials science, batteries, and control systems, and automatically translating on-screen schematics into fabrication instructions which can be sent directly to 3D printers to build components.
• Dongjin Seo, age 31, is developing brain-machine communication including the circuit boards and chips for Elon Musk’s Neuralink where he heads up a team building low-power wireless computers to interface with the human brain.

Under Humanitarians, MIT has recognized:

• Mohamed Dhaouafi, age 28, is developing high-functioning, affordable, that is for people in the Developing World, artificial limbs that use software to connect the body’s electrical system to the onboard sensors allowing wearers to flex or relax muscles.
• Alex Le Roux, age 27, is the co-founder of Icon and the brains behind the Vulcan, industrial-scale 3D printer that can construct an entire house in 24 hours and that is currently building the first 3D-printed community in Mexico.
• Katharina Volz, age 33, is using machine learning to study Parkinson’s and has created OccamzRazor, a knowledge map that reveals how the disease starts and progresses to help with therapy.
• David Warsinger, age 32, is improving reverse osmosis through a process called batch reverse osmosis, to make desalination work better for the 3.6 billion on our planet who currently live with freshwater scarcity at least one month each year.

And in the final category, Pioneers, we have:

• Ghena Alhanaee, age 30, is working on a data-driven framework for mitigating disasters in high-risk infrastructure around the planet including offshore oil platforms, nuclear plants, and more.
• Avinash Manjula Basavanna, age 30, is developing bioplastics produced by bioengineered organisms which he calls AquaPlastic, and which can be produced on a commercial scale, and degrades in water in as little as two months.
• Lili Cai, age 33, has invented a nanomaterial textile that is as thin as a T-shirt but capable of keeping you warm or cooling you off by blocking or transmitting infrared radiation from our skin.
• Gregory Ekchian, age 32, is the cofounder of Stratagen Bio, a sensor that reads tumor oxygen levels and allows oncologists to personalize cancer treatment, reducing patient radiation exposure.
• Jennifer Glick, age 30, is an IBM researcher working with quantum computing to solve real-world problems faster than conventional systems from looking at securities transaction settlements to identifying new particles produced in high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.
• Andrej Karpathy, age 33, is developing convolutional neural networks that mimic the nerves in the visual cortex making it possible for the AI to discern multiple objects in a complex scene, useful for self-driving and collision avoidance in autonomous vehicles.
• Siddharth Krishnan, age 29, is a materials scientist who is developing tiny sensors to collect medical data for disease detection non-invasively for conditions like hydrocephaly, diabetes, and others.
• Andreas Puschnik, age 31, is using CRISPR to develop host-directed therapeutics to fight diseases like Dengue, Zika, Ebola, West Nile and other viruses.