We’re delighted to announce four internationally recognized innovators will address the teams and guests gathered at the awards ceremony this month, Dr Elazer Edelman, Isaac Castro, and Dr Marta Fernández Suárez. They will speak on a panel to be moderated by MIT linQ faculty member Dr Norberto Malpica.
Elazer Edelman, MD, PhD
Dr. Elazer Edelman, is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a coronary care unit cardiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He and his laboratory have pioneered basic findings in vascular biology and the development and assessment of biotechnology. Dr. Edelman directs the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center (BMEC), dedicated to applying the rigors of the physical sciences to elucidate fundamental biologic processes and mechanisms of disease. BMEC programs span a wide range of disciplines, with its resources made available to investigators from MIT and Harvard.
Dr. Edelman’s research melds his clinical and medical training and interests, focusing on understanding how tissue architecture and biochemical regulation contribute to local growth control.The applied aspects of his work flow from the umbrella of growth modulation. He reasoned that the optimal way to control a biologic event was by recapitulating natural means of regulation. Hence, polymeric controlled drug delivery systems should mimic natural release systems, and vascular implants should be devised with an intimate knowledge of the injury they induce. The development and mathematical characterization of perivascular and stent-based drug delivery is an example of the former, and design of an endovascular stent from first principles is an example of the latter.
Edelman holds a diploma from, and is a fellow of, the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. As Chief Scientific Advisor of Science: Translational Medicine he has set the tone for the national debate on translational research and innovation.
Isaac Castro
MSc in Telecommunications Engineering; Graduate Studies Program on Exponential Technologies, Singularity University, NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Emerge, a company that develops a new form of communication by digitizing our sense of touch. Working to foster a sense of connectedness when it is impossible to physically be present in today’s globalized, over-connected world, and striving to address human disconnection and its consequences in mental health and our ageing population. Moonshot: develop wireless brain-to-brain communication that connects individuals through all of the senses. 2015, selected to join the first MIT Innovators Under 35 Summit at European Parliament. Invited to be part of the inaugural community of Solve at MIT, whose mission is to inspire extraordinary people to work together to solve the world’s toughest problems. Recipient: Innovator Under 35, MIT’s Technology Review magazine, for the invention of medical equipment for more effective cancer treatment (2013). Interest: creating new technologies to positively impact people’s lives.
Marta Fernandez Suarez, PhD
Marta’s professional career reflects her expertise in low-cost technologies for global development, spanning more than 10 years of fieldwork experience. Her projects have included minimally-invasive protein fluorescent reporters to enable real time observation and manipulation of biological systems at the cellular level; the design and development of low-cost and appropriate water and sanitation technologies for implementation in Latin America and East Africa; and microfluidic devices for point-of-care diagnosis of tuberculosis. Marta obtained her B.S. in Chemistry and M.S. in Chemical Engineering at the Institut Quimic de Sarria (Barcelona, Spain) and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Norberto Malpica, PhD
Norberto Malpica, PhDNorberto Malpica is an associate professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) in Madrid. He received an MsEng. in Telecommunication engineering and a PhD in medical imaging from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). Norberto is currently the Director of the multidisciplinary research group on Computer Vision and Image Processing at URJC, and the Technical Director of the Madri+d Medical Image Analysis and Biometry Lab. The lab provides image quantification services for clinical and research studies, and performs research on new methods to obtain precise biomarkers from multimodal imaging data. He is also the cofounder of Medimsight, a cloud platform for medical image quantification.