Advances in sensing and imaging technologies coupled with increasingly powerful data analytics and machine-learning capabilities are transforming health-related fields. Can chemical and bacterial sensors aid in research and diagnosis? How will developments in machine perception improve medical imaging? From high-powered data-processing to innovative image capture the 2017 MIT Health Sensing & Imaging Conference will make you exclaim, “You can do what?”
Education Partner:
About MIT Professional Education: MIT Professional Education (http://web.mit.edu/professional) provides a gateway to MIT expertise and knowledge for science and engineering professionals around the world. Through MIT Professional Education programs taught by renowned faculty from across the Institute, technical professionals have the opportunity to gain crucial and timely knowledge in specialized fields, to advance their careers, boost their organization performance, and help make a difference in the world.
ILP members receive a 15 percent discount on all MIT Professional Education Short Programs and Digital Programs at time of registration.
Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.
In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.
He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Sheryl Greenberg initiates and promotes the interactions and development of relationships between academic and industrial entities to facilitate the transfer of new ideas and technologies between MIT and companies, and has created numerous successful partnerships. By understanding the business, technology, and commercial problems within a company, and understanding the technologies and expertise of MIT researchers, Greenberg identifies appropriate resources and expertise to foster new technology applications and collaborative opportunities.
Prior to MIT, Greenberg created and directed the Office of Technology Transfer at Brandeis University. In the process of managing intellectual property protection, marketing, and licensing, she has promoted the successful commercialization of technologies as diverse as new chemicals and manufacturing, biotechnology, food compositions, software, and medical devices. She facilitated the founding and funding of new companies, as well as creating a profitable technology transfer program. She also facilitated the patenting, marketing, and licensing of Massachusetts General Hospital technologies. In addition to her cellular, biochemical, and genetic research experience in academic and corporate environments, she has also created intellectual property for medical uses. Greenberg has been an independent intellectual property and business development consultant, is a U.S. Patent Agent, and has previously served the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation as Co-Chair of the Islet Research Program Advisory Committee and grant reviewer. She currently also mentors startup companies and facilitates partnering them with large life science and healthcare companies.
Program Director, MIT Corporate Relations Industrial Liaison Program
Erik Vogan joined the Office of Corporate Relations on June 1, 2015.
Erik brings to the Office of Corporate Relations numerous years of experience in big data and analytics, business development and partnering, and research and technology development, particularly in the areas of biotechnology and life sciences. Prior to joining the Office of Corporate Relations, Erik worked as a consultant to Boston-area venture capital and biotechnology companies and was a cofounder of Krypton Immuno-oncology.
At Beryllium Discovery Corporation, Erik was Vice President of Drug Discovery, leading functions in Business Development and Research. At Permeon Biologics, Erik founded the research laboratory and served as Director, Protein Sciences. Prior to that, Erik held positions as Head of Structural Biology at Acceleron Pharma and Senior Scientist at Wyeth Research.
Erik earned his B.S. in Genetics at the University of California, Davis and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Brandeis University working with Gregory Petsko, followed by postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Stephen C. Harrison at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital, Boston. Erik recently completed his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
He has numerous patents, publications, and presentations to his credit.
Professor of Chemical Engineering MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Professor Michael S. Strano is currently the Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received is B.S from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY and Ph.D. from the University of Delaware both in Chemical Engineering. He was a post doctoral research fellow at Rice University in the departments of Chemistry and Physics under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley. From 2003 to 2007, Michael was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving to MIT. His research focuses on biomolecule/nanoparticle interactions and the surface chemistry of low dimensional systems, nano-electronics, nanoparticle separations, and applications of vibrational spectroscopy to nanotechnology. Michael is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including a 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a 2006 Beckman Young Investigator Award, the 2006 Coblentz Award for Molecular Spectroscopy, the Unilever Award from the American Chemical Society in 2007 for excellence in colloidal science, and the 2008 Young Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, the 2008 Allen P. Colburn Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and recently selected as a member of Popular Science’s Brilliant 10.
Our lab at MIT has been interested in how the nanoparticle corona – the region of adsorbed molecules surrounding the particle surface - can be engineered for molecular recognition. We have recently introduced a method we call CoPhMoRe or Corona Phase Molecular Recognition for discovering synthetic, heteropolymer corona phases that form molecular recognition sites at the nanoparticle interface, selected from a heteropolymer library. We show that certain synthetic heteropolymers , once constrained onto a single-walled carbon nanotube by chemical adsorption, also form a new corona phase that exhibits highly selective recognition for specific molecules. We have a growing list of biomolecules that we can detect using this approach including riboflavin, L-thyroxine, dopamine, nitric oxide, sugar alcohols, estradiol, as well as proteins such as fibrinogen. The results have significant potential in light of the fact that nanoparticles such as single walled carbon nanotubes can be interfaced to biological systems at the sub-cellular level, with unprecedented sensitivity. Several recent demonstrates indicate that spatial and temporal information on cellular chemical signaling can be obtained using arrays of such sensors. Other examples including sensor tattoos for mice, stable for more than 400 days in-vivo, will be shown. Lastly, I will highlight recent advances to control the trafficking and localization of nanoparticle systems in living plants using a mechanism that we call Lipid Exchange Envelope Penetration (LEEP). We demonstrate a living plant, interfaced with multiple nanoparticle types that can detect explosives, ATP and dopamine within or from outside the plant, and communicate this information to a user’s cell phone. Engineering the nanoparticle corona in this way offers significant potential to translate sensor technology to previously inaccessible environments.
Principal Research Scientist Health 0.0 MIT Media Lab
Dr. Pratik Shah is a Principal Research Scientist at The MIT Media Lab. His research program creates novel intersections between engineering, medical imaging, machine learning, and medicine to improve health outcomes for patients. Ongoing research areas: 1) artificial intelligence and machine learning methods for the detection of cancer biomarkers using standard photographs vs. expensive medical images; 2) unorthodox artificial intelligence algorithms to design optimal and faster clinical trials to reduce adverse effects on patients; and 3) point-of-care medical technologies for real world data and evidence generation to improve public health. Past acknowledgments include the American Society for Microbiology’s Raymond W. Sarber National Award, a Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospitals ECOR Fund for Medical Discovery postdoctoral fellowship, coverage by leading national and international news media outlets. Dr. Shah has been an invited discussion leader at Gordon Research Seminars; a speaker at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Gordon Research Conferences, and IEEE bioengineering conferences; and a peer reviewer for leading scientific publications and funding agencies. Dr. Shah has a BS, MS, and a PhD in biological sciences and completed fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Harvard Medical School.
Advances in optics, biological sensing, medical imaging technologies, high throughput genetic sequencing is leading to massive datasets, which need to be analyzed. However, current Artificial Intelligence algorithms usually require 1000’s of examples of well-annotated datasets for high accuracy classification. Fluorescent biomarkers are important indicators of disease such as oral cancer, but imaging them can require specialized and often-expensive devices. Medical images, if diagnosed early with biomarker images and expert knowledge, can be valuable to prevent occurrences of serious systemic illnesses. In this lecture, we will discuss two convolutional neural network classifiers trained with disease signatures and fluorescent biomarker images to identify biomarkers in white light images as a per-pixel binary classification task. Once trained, the classifiers predict the location and intensity of fluorescent biomarkers in white light images without requiring specialized biomarker imaging devices or expert intervention. This generalized approach can be useful in other domains where diagnostic biomarker predicting can augment expert knowledge using standard white light images.
Henry Ellis Warren (1894) professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Polina Golland is a Henry Ellis Warren (1894) professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a principal investigator at MIT CSAIL. Her primary research interest is in developing novel techniques for medical image analysis and understanding. With her students, Golland has demonstrated novel approaches to image segmentation, shape analysis, functional image analysis and population studies. She has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis. Golland is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Image Analysis. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions.
Polina Golland will discuss her group's research in computational analysis of MRI scans that aims to provide accurate measurements of healthy anatomy and physiology, and biomarkers of pathology. Applications range from fetal development to aging brain.
Assistant Director, Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Dr. Tarek Fadel is the Assistant Director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Before joining MIT, Dr. Fadel was a Staff Scientist at the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO), the coordinating body for the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). During his time at NNCO, he served as the Executive Secretary for the Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee of the White House’s National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Technology. The NSET Subcommittee coordinates planning, budgeting, program implementation, and review of the NNI.
Dr. Fadel received his PhD from Yale University in 2011, where he continued as a post-doctoral researcher to develop nanoscale platforms for cancer immunotherapy. He previously held positions as Vice President for Research at the International Technology Research Institute, and Product and Systems Interaction Engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dr. Fadel is lead author of several peer-reviewed publications in the fields of nanomedicine, cancer immunotherapy, and biophysics.
Early and accurate detection of cancer represents an enormous opportunity for sensing technologies to impact patients' lives. I will discuss several examples of diagnostic technologies developed in the Bhatia lab that employ nanosensors to detect tumors using a simple urine test for readout. This platform technology uses nanosensors to detect enzyme activity associated with cancer invasion, and generate bar-coded reporters that can be detected by multiplexed mass spectrometry or antibody-based methods such as lateral flow assays. I will close the presentation with an introduction to the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, a new growing resource for the nanomedicine community.
Timothy M. Swager is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry the Department of Chemistry at MIT and the Faculty Director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. In this latter role, Professor Swager works with the Center’s Executive Director to define the Center’s strategy for fostering innovation, assists with the commercialization of MIT technologies, and plays a key role in the grant selection process. Professor Swager also serves as the Center’s liaison to the MIT academic community, and senior leadership, sitting on faculty and academic committees. Following Professor Swager’s postdoctoral appointment at MIT, he joined the chemistry faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, returning to MIT in 1996 as a Professor of Chemistry, and served as the Head of Chemistry from 2005-2010. Professor Swager’s research interests are in design, synthesis, and study of organic-based electronic, sensory, high-strength and liquid crystalline materials. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and more than 80 issued/pending patents. Professor Swager is the founder of four companies (DyNuPol, Iptyx, PolyJoule, and C2Sense) and has served on a number of corporate and government boards.He received a B.S. from Montana State University in 1983 and a Ph.D., from the California Institute of Technology in 1988.
This lecture will detail the creation of ultrasensitive sensors based on electronically active conjugated polymers (CPs) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). A central concept that a single nano- or molecular-wire spanning between two electrodes would create an exceptional sensor if binding of a molecule of interest to it would block all electronic transport. The use of molecular electronic circuits to give signal gain is not limited to electrical transport and CP-based fluorescent sensors can provide ultratrace detection of chemical vapors via amplification resulting from exciton migration. Nanowire networks of CNTs provide for a practical approximation to the single nanowire scheme. These methods include abrasion deposition and selectivity is generated by covalent and/or non-covalent binding selectors/receptors to the carbon nanotubes. Sensors for a variety of materials and cross-reactive sensor arrays will be described. The use of carbon nanotube based gas sensors for the detection of ethylene and other gases relevant to agricultural and food production/storage/transportation are being specifically targeted and can be used to create systems that increase production, manage inventories, and minimize losses.
Emanuel E Landsman (1958) Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Max Shulaker began as assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2016, where he leads the Novels (Novel Electronic Systems Group) at MIT. Prior to joining MIT, he was at Stanford University where he received his BS, Masters, and PhD in Electrical Engineering. Shulaker’s research interests include the broad area of nanosystems. His research group focuses on understanding and optimizing multidisciplinary interactions across the entire computing stack – from low-level synthesis of nanomaterials, to fabrication processes and circuit design for emerging nanotechnologies, up to new architectures – to enable the next generation of high performance and energy-efficient computing systems. His research results include the demonstration of the first carbon nanotube computer(highlighted on the cover of Nature and presented as a Research Highlight to the US Congress by the US NSF), the first digital sub-systems built entirely using carbon nanotube transistors (awarded the ISSCC Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper), the first monolithically-integrated 3D integrated circuits combining arbitrary vertical stacking of logic and memory, the highest performance carbon nanotube transistors to-date, and the first highly-scaled carbon nanotube transistors fabricated in a VLSI-compatible manner.
While trillions of sensors that will soon connected to the “Internet of Everything” (IoE) promise to transform our lives, they simultaneously pose major obstacles, which we are already encountering today. The massive amount of generated raw data (i.e., the “data deluge”) is quickly exceeding computing capabilities, and cannot be overcome by isolated improvements in sensors, transistors, memories, or architectures alone. Rather, an end-to-end approach is needed, whereby the unique benefits of new emerging nanotechnologies – for sensors, memories, and transistors – are exploited to realize new system architectures that are not possible with today’s technologies. However, emerging nanomaterials and nanodevices suffer from significant imperfections and variations. Thus, realizing working circuits, let alone transformative nanosystems, has been infeasible. In this talk, I present a path towards realizing these future systems in the near-term, and show how based on the progress of several emerging nanotechnologies (carbon nanotubes for logic, non-volatile memories for data storage, and new materials for sensing), we can begin realizing these systems today. As a case-study, I will discuss how by leveraging emerging nanotechnologies, we have realized the first monolithically-integrated three-dimensional (3D) nanosystem architectures with vertically-integrated layers of logic, memory, and sensing circuits. With dense and fine-grained connectivity between millions of on-chip sensors, data storage, and embedded computation, such nanosystems can capture terabytes of data from the outside world every second, and produce “processed information” by performing in-situ classification of the sensor data using on-chip accelerators. As a demonstration, we tailor a demo system for gas classification, for real-time health monitoring from breath.
Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry MIT Department of Chemistry
Professor Moungi Bawendi received his A.B. in 1982 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1988 from The University of Chicago. This was followed by two years of postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories, working with Dr. Louis Brus, where he began his studies on nanomaterials. Bawendi joined the faculty at MIT in 1990, becoming Associate Professor in 1995 and Professor in 1996.
Professor Bawendi has followed an interdisciplinary research program that aims at probing the science and developing the technology of chemically synthesized nanocrystals. Prof. Bawendi has been at the forefront of the science and technology of semiconductor nanocrystal quantum dots for over two decades. This work has included the development of novel methods for synthesizing, characterizing, and processing quantum dots and magnetic nanoparticles as novel materials building blocks, studying the fundamental optical properties of quantum dots using a variety of spectroscopic methods, including the development of optical tools to study single nanocrystals, and combining quantum dots with various optical and electronic device structures to study their device properties. His work has also included developing applications of quantum dots in biological and biomedical imaging and sensing, in light emitting devices, photodetection, and solar energy conversion.
Professor Bawendi has published over 250 papers on the science and technology of quantum dots and other materials systems, and has helped four start-up companies in commercializing quantum dot technology. A fifth company spun out from Bawendi’s laboratory uses knowledge gained from his work on quantum dots, applying it to a medical device.
Bawendi has won numerous awards for his work. Among these are the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, the EO Lawrence award in Materials Chemistry from the US Department of Energy, the Fred Kavli Distinguished Lecture in Nanoscience from the Materials Research Society, and the American Chemical Society Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry.
Bawendi is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Our laboratory focuses on the science and applications of nanocrystals, especially semiconductor nanocrystal (aka quantum dots). Our research ranges from the very fundamental to applications in electro-optics and biology. There is an ongoing effort to address the challenges of making new compositions and morphologies of nanocrystals and nanocrystal heterostructures, and new ligands so that the nanocrystals can be incorporated into hybrid organic/inorganic devices, or biological systems. We are collaborating with a number of biology and medical groups to design nanocrystal probes that meet specific challenges.
Dina Katabi is the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the director of MIT’s Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Wireless@MIT). Katabi is also a MacArthur Fellow and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. She received her PhD and MS from MIT and her BS from Damascus University. Katabi has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, the NBX Career Development chair, and the NSF CAREER award. Katabi's doctoral dissertation won an ACM Honorable Mention award and a Sprowls award for academic excellence. Further, her work was recognized by the IEEE William R. Bennett prize, three ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper awards, an NSDI Best Paper award, the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award, and a TR10 award for her work on the sparse Fourier transform. Several start-ups have been spun out of Katabi's lab, such as PiCharging and Emerald.
This talk introduces Emerald, a novel MIT technology for in-home non-intrusive patient monitoring. The Emerald device is a WiFi-like box that runs customized machine learning algorithms to learn digital biomarkers from the wireless signals in the patient's home. It can remotely monitor the patient’s gait speed, falls, respiratory signal, heart rate, and sleep quality and stages. The sensing is completely passive—i.e., the patient can go about her normal life without having to wear any sensors on her body, write a diary, or actively measure herself.
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group Co-Director, MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator MIT Media Lab
Ed Boyden is a professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain, and applies them systematically to reveal ground truth principles of biological function as well as to repair these systems. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include expansion microscopy, which enables complex biological systems to be imaged with nanoscale precision, optogenetic tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural activity with light, and optical, nanofabricated, and robotic interfaces that enable recording and control of neural dynamics. He has launched an award-winning series of classes at MIT that teach principles of neuroengineering, starting with basic principles of how to control and observe neural functions, and culminating with strategies for launching companies in the nascent neurotechnology space. He also co-directs the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, which aims to develop new tools to accelerate neuroscience progress.
Amongst other recognitions, he has received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2015), the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2015), the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (2015), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (2013), the NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2013), the NIH Director's Transformative Research Award (twice, 2012 and 2013), and the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2011). He was also named to the World Economic Forum Young Scientist list (2013), the Technology Review World’s "Top 35 Innovators under Age 35" list (2006), and his work was included in Nature Methods "Method of the Year" in 2010.
His group has hosted hundreds of visitors to learn how to use new biotechnologies, and he also regularly teaches at summer courses and workshops in neuroscience, and delivers lectures to the broader public (e.g., TED (2011); World Economic Forum (2012, 2013, 2016)). Ed received his Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned. Before that, he received three degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. He has contributed to over 300 peer-reviewed papers, current or pending patents, and articles, and has given over 300 invited talks on his group's work.
Understanding the brain could lead to new kinds of computational algorithms and artificial intelligences, as well as treatments for intractable disorders that affect over a billion people worldwide. However, the brain is a very complex, densely wired circuit, and understanding how it works has remained elusive. In order to map how these circuits are organized, and control their complex dynamics, we are building new tools, which include methods for physically expanding brain circuits so that we can see their building blocks, as well as molecules that make neural circuits controllable by light. Through these tools we aim to enable the systematic analysis and repair of the brain.
Dr. Anthony is Associate Director of MIT.nano, Faculty Lead for the Industry Immersion Program in Mechanical Engineering, and Co-Director of the MIT Clinical Research Center. With over 25 years’ experience in product realization—Dr. Anthony won an Emmy (from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) in broadcast technical innovation—Dr. Anthony designs instruments and techniques to monitor and control physical systems. His work involves systems analysis and design and calling upon mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, along with computer science and optimization, to create solutions.
The focus of Dr. Anthony’s research is computational instrumentation—the design of instruments and techniques to measure and control complex physical systems. His research includes the development of instrumentation and measurement solutions for manufacturing systems and medical diagnostics and imaging systems. In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation, product realization, and business entrepreneurship and commercialization at the intersection between information technology and advanced manufacturing. His teaching interests include the modelling of large-scale systems in a wide variety of decision-making domains and the development of optimization algorithms and software for analyzing and designing such systems. He has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation as well as business entrepreneurship.
The impetus for the SENSE.nano is the recognition that novel sensors and sensing system are bound to provide previously unimaginable insight into the condition of individuals, as well as built and natural world, to positively impact people, machines, and environment. Advances in nano-sciences and nano-technologies, pursued by many at MIT, now offer unprecedented opportunities to realize designs for, and at-scale manufacturing of, unique sensors and sensing systems, while leveraging data-science and IoT infrastructure.
Alberto is the Head of Philips HealthWorks at Royal Philips. HealthWorks mission is to boost breakthrough innovation whilst fueling a culture of entrepreneurship within Philips. In order to achieve this, HealthWorks helps Businesses define and validate next generation healthcare solutions that aim to deliver superior value and new business model opportunities. It also engages and invests in startups, as well as incubating and growing a number of internal business ventures.
Previously, he created and led the Digital Innovation Program in Philips Consumer Lifestyle division, initiating a fundamental transformation in traditional innovation practices that delivered the first wave of Philips connected products.
Alberto started his professional career as a management consultant with mobile operator start-ups across Europe and Asia. He then joined NEC Europe, driving Strategy and Product Planning of their mobile handset division. Later he joined Symbian Software as Vice President of Global Product Management, responsible for the product strategy, investment allocation and roadmap of the market-leading mobile Operating System of the time. After the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia, Alberto was involved in setting up the Symbian Foundation which became the vehicle to open source the Symbian code. He subsequently joined Nokia as Head of R&D strategy where he led the development of a new software platform and solutions strategy.
Alberto graduated in Engineering and Economics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) and holds an MBA from INSEAD (France). He is a regular speaker at industry events and media.
Philips is in the journey of transforming itself to become a healthtech leader. A fundamental element in this transformation consists in leveraging digital technologies to create new solutions that can address the biggest healthcare challenges of today & tomorrow. Equally, this new paradigm dictates a new way of working when it comes to developing and commercializing breakthrough innovations – adopting new and more entrepreneurial techniques internally, whilst at the same time partnering up with the thriving healthcare ecosystem: from startups, to hospital partners and academic institutions. Philips has recently launched HealthWorks to spearhead the acceleration of breakthrough innovation whilst at the same time fuel a culture of entrepreneurship within Philips. By building a platform to co-create next generation solutions and engage with early stage entrepreneurs, HealthWorks is paving the way for Philips to consolidate itself as one of healthtech leading companies.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
MIT Startup Exchange maintains a propriety database of over 1,500 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.
STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 230 member companies.
MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.
- Mark Pascarella, Co-Founder, nQ Medical - Jim Flanigon, Honeycomb Bio - Charles Barr, Co-Founder, High Q Imaging - Xinjie (Jeff) Zhang, President, Novarials - Peter Insley, Data Scientist, Composable Analytics - Andrew Warren, Founding Scientist & Lead Product Development, Glympse Bio - Clifford Reid, President, Travera - Charles Fracchia, CEO & Co-Founder, BioBright