ASPIRING AGENTS OF CHANGE
MIT names 35 top young innovators in technology
MIT Technology Review yesterday announced its annual list of Innovators Under 35, a Who’s Who of some of the most cutting-edge technologists whose innovations are poised to transform our world.
This year’s list includes inventors, entrepreneurs, humanitarians, pioneers and visionaries in fields ranging from software and biotechnology to transportation and artificial intelligence. The 35 honorees are culled from nearly 600 nominations from around the world. And, for the first time in the list’s 18-year history, women outnumber men, 18 to 17.
“In many of the areas we look at, we’re seeing more and more women becoming leaders in their fields,” said David Rotman, editor of the MIT Technology Review. “The biggest hope we have is that the list provides a window into what we think are the most important new technologies being worked on for decades to come. These are the people who will lead these areas of technology.”
When Niki Bayat of Iran learned that soldiers who suffer incisions on the surface of their eyes while on the battlefield often go blind, she developed a glue made of a polymer that can be used to close the incisions until the soldiers can be moved to a hospital where the glue is removed and their eyes can be operated on.
“I couldn’t think of any more interesting project than helping prevent blindness,” said Bayat, the 32-year-old co-founder and chief science officer of AesculaTech.
Like blindness, hearing loss in humans can be traumatic. But Will McLean, cofounder of Woburn-based Frequency Therapeutics, has developed an innovation that may reverse hearing loss by using a combination of drugs that activate regeneration of cells and help the body to heal itself. To combat hearing loss, the company has developed an injectable, in-ear treatment, which has successfully passed human safety trials.
“It’s a great space to be in if you want to change people’s lives,” said McLean, 31.
After helping two friends leave abusive marriages in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, Hera Hussain realized just how difficult it could be.
“They didn’t know who to turn to outside their families,” said Hussain, 28, of the U.K. “It was too overwhelming.”
So in 2013, she created Chayn.co, a website run by a global volunteer network to provide victims of gender-based violence with survivor-led resources around the clock and in multiple languages. In the five years since, the website has helped more than 200,000 people find answers to questions about everything from how to prove that they’ve been abused to what to do if they’re being stalked.
Alice Zhang, founder and CEO of Verge Genomics, is trying a new approach to drug development for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by developing machine-learning models that identify key genes within a disease network and predict which compounds might disrupt their activity. Zhang, 29, is aiming to have an ALS drug in clinical trials by 2021.
To learn more about each of the honorees, visit www. technologyreview.com/tr35.