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Visiting Scholars
Noubar Afeyan is a recognized technologist and entrepreneur, having founded and helped build over 20 life science and technology startups during the past 23 years. A Senior Lecturer at MIT in the Sloan School of Management as well as the Biological Engineering Division, Noubar has authored numerous scientific publications and patents. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering from MIT in 1987. In 1999 Noubar co-founded Flagship Ventures, an early stage venture capital and entrepreneurship firm. Prior to that, he participated in creating and launching six highly successful new ventures.
Inventor Chuck Hoberman seamlessly fuses the disciplines of art, architecture and engineering. He demonstrates that objects which are foldable, retractable or shape-shifting have functional benefits: portability, instantaneous opening, and intelligent responsiveness to the built environment. His practice, Hoberman Associates works on diverse projects, from consumer products to deployable shelters, space structures, and buildings. In 2008, Hoberman co-founded the Adaptive Building Initiative – a joint venture with the global engineering firm Buro Happold dedicated to designing a new generation of buildings that optimize their configuration in real time by responding to environmental changes. Hoberman holds a bachelor's degree in sculpture from Cooper Union and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He won the Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1997 and has several dozen patents and patents pending for his inventions.
Misia Landau received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University, a Diploma in Human Biology from Oxford University, and taught at Yale, Wellesley, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Boston University prior to becoming the senior science writer at Harvard Medical School. Before leaving Harvard last year, she published over 500 articles on a wide range of cutting edge biological discoveries, and her work has been honored by the American Medical Writers Association and the Association of American Colleges. She also authored a book, Narratives of Human Evolution, and has written numerous essays on the role of narrative in science. She joins the Wyss community to explore how to convey human stories of scientific discovery at the interface between art, science, design, and engineering.
Shulamit Levenberg is associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, Israel. She is conducting interdisciplinary research in tissue engineering and stem cells focusing on vascularization of engineered tissues and engineering stem cell microenvironments. Levenberg received her Ph.D. in 1999 from the Weizmann Institute of Science, specializing in molecular cell biology and cell adhesion, and later did her postdoctoral training and research (1999-2004) at Prof. Robert Langer's group at MIT. Levenberg was awarded the 2006 Krill price of the Wolf foundation for excellence in scientific research. She was also nominated as a Research Leader in Tissue Engineering by the Scientific American Journal (the 2006 Scientific American 50 Award) for her work on engineering vascularized tissues. In 2007, Prof. Levenberg received The Henry Taub Prize for Academic Excellence and in 2008 was awarded the France-Israel Foundation Prize for scientific excellence in stem cell research. In 2009 she was awarded in Rome the "The Excellence for Israel Prize" and won the TEVA research award.
Stephen Mann is Professor of Chemistry, Director of the Centre for Organized Matter Chemistry, and Principal of the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials at the University of Bristol, UK. His research interests are focused on the chemical synthesis, characterization, and emergence of complex forms of organized matter, including models of protocell assembly. He has published over 400 scientific papers and has served on the editorial advisory boards of numerous journals including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Science, and Small. Prof. Mann was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK, in 2003, and was the recipient of the 2011 Royal Society of Chemistry de Gennes Medal. He received the Chemical Society of France, French-British Prize for 2011.
Jonathan Rosen is the founding director of the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization at Boston University. He now serves as the Special Assistant for Entrepreneurial Studies in the Office of the Provost, and is Adjunct Professor of BioMedical Engineering in the BU College of Engineering. Rosen’s career in developing medical technologies spans more than three decades and includes corporate, new venture, and non-profit enterprises dedicated to improving care for under-served patient populations. Rosen received his Ph.D. in Biomaterials Science from Case Western Reserve University, and his MBA in Strategic Planning from Columbia University.
Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where she is Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and co-directs the MIT Center for Robotics at CSAIL. Her research interests include distributed robotics and mobile computing and her application focus includes transportation, security, environmental modeling and monitoring, underwater exploration, and agriculture. Rus is notable for spear-heading research in programmable matter by developing self-configuring robots. Rus is the recipient of the NSF Career Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. She is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of AAAI and IEEE. Before receiving her appointment at MIT, she was Professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth, where she founded and directed two laboratories in robotics and mobile computing. Rus has earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
Pat Sapinsley is President of Build Efficiently, LLC, a company she founded that works to further the successful deployment of energy efficient technologies in the built world. Prior to starting Build Efficiently, she was Venture Partner at Good Energies LLC, a global venture capital firm in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industry, where she focused on investing in early stage energy efficiency technology and green buildings materials companies. She is Co-Chair of the Committee on the Environment of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. At the Wyss Institute, Sapinsley will assist in translating emerging technologies into commercial products through collaborations with the construction and design industry, strategic corporate entities, and venture capital investors. She is a LEED AP architect, and she holds a Masters in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She has taught at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, the Parsons School of Design, and the City College of New York.
Ullrich Steiner is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Physics of Materials at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the manufacture of materials based on molecular self assembly with applications in sustainable energy, photonics, biomimetic structure formation, photonics in nature, and the physics macromolecules far from thermodynamic equilibrium. He is the recipient of the 2002 Raymond and Beverley Sackler Prize, a fellow of St. Edmunds College and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. From 2005-2009, he was the founding chairman of the editorial board of the RSC Journal Soft Matter.
Erik Winfree is Professor of Computer Science, Computation & Neural Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. He is the recipient of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2006), the NSF PECASE/CAREER Award (2001), the ONR Young Investigators Award (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), and the Tulip prize in DNA Computing (2000). He was also named in MIT Technology Review's first TR100 list of "top young innovators" (1999). Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 1999, Winfree was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT AI Lab. Winfree received a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech in 1998.
