Fusion Genius Series features Blavatnik Awards Honorees

Published on Sep 10, 2014

Michal Lipson is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and is the winner of 2010 Blavatnik Regional Awards. Dr. Lipson is one of the main pioneers in the field of silicon photonics.  She is the inventor of several of the critical building blocks in the field, including the GHz silicon modulator. Dr. Lipson is currently serving on the board of directors for two international photonics centers, two start up companies and on the Rice ECE Advancement Committee. She is a co-founder of PicoLuz, a company specializing in nonlinear silicon photonic components.

David Blei is a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Columbia University and the winner of 2013 Blavatnik Regional Awards. He is a pioneer of probabilistic topic models, a family of machine learning techniques for discovering the abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents.  In addition to working on topic modeling, Dr. Blei has developed models of social networks, music and audio, images and computer vision, and neuroscience and brain activity. Recently, he and his students developed generic and efficient algorithms to fit a wide class of statistical models to massive data sets, changing the scale at which we can apply sophisticated methods for data science.

Ali Khademhosseini is a Professor at Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as well as an Associate Faculty at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. His research is based on developing micro- and nanoscale technologies to control cellular behavior with particular emphasis in developing microscale biomaterials and engineering systems for tissue engineering. His laboratory is combining microengineering technologies with state-of-art 3D printing and microfluidic devices to build organs-on-a-chip platforms with on-line sensing units for applications such as drug and toxin screening.

Ali Hajimiri is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is 2014 Blavatnik National Awards Finalist. Dr. Hajimiri's research is focused on electronics and photonics integrated circuits and their applications in various disciplines, including high-frequency and high-speed communications, sensing, imaging, and bio-sensing. His research group engages in both, the theoretical analysis of the problems in integrated circuits as well as practical implementations of new systems.