MIT's top 35 under 35 innovators: A Kenyan makes the list - Page 2 of 7 - The Sauce
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Enterprise

MIT’s top 35 under 35 innovators: A Kenyan makes the list

2 of 7
Use your ← → (arrow) keys to browse

Leslie Dewan

Leslie Dewan

Leslie Dewan, 28, has dared to invent a new type of nuclear reactor. For decades the nuclear industry has built one type of reactor, called a light-water reactor, almost exclusively. There are significant problems with that technology, which uses ordinary water to cool the fuel rods in which the nuclear reaction takes place.

It requires expensive safeguards against a radiation-releasing meltdown if the fuel rods overheat; it produces waste products that are dangerous for 100,000 years. Dewan and a fellow graduate student, Mark Massie, designed an alternative based on molten-salt reactors that were originally proposed in the 1950s as a way to power aircraft. Though nuclear planes never became a reality, the reactor design has several key advantages. For one thing, it can be readily modified so that rather than producing large amounts of waste, it reuses much of the spent nuclear material as fuel.

 

David Fattal

David Fattal

David Fatal, 34, a French-born quantum physicist is a researcher at HP Labs. He’s a master of nanoscale light tricks, and the feat he unveiled this year is his most impressive yet. It’s a new kind of display that can project colorful moving images, viewable in three dimensions from multiple angles without any special glasses.

Fattal’s invention, which he calls a “multidirectional backlight,” consists of a thin piece of glass (or plastic) with light-emitting diodes mounted on its edge. Thanks to its particular design, which governs the angle at which the light is propagated, the device takes advantage of total internal reflection—the same optical phenomenon used in fiber optics.

 

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Christine Fleming

Christine Fleming

Christine Fleming, 30, an assistant professor at Columbia University, is trying to give cardiologists a powerful new tool: high-resolution movies of the living, beating heart, available in real time during cardiac procedures. Such technology might also one day help physicians pinpoint the source of dangerous irregular heart rhythms without invasive biopsies. It could even help monitor treatment. Fleming, an electrical engineer who joined the faculty at Columbia University this year, has designed a new type of catheter capable of imaging heart muscle.

 

Roozbeh Ghaffari

RoozbehGhaffari

Roozbeh Ghaffari, 33, a microbiologist, managed to build a system that could measure what the structure was actually doing. “It supports a traveling wave of energy that can propagate along the cochlea. That hadn’t been known before,” he says. And this could help explain how the human ear can detect both very loud and very soft sounds, as well as a wide range of pitches.

Indeed, while Roozbeh Ghaffari’s lifelong interest in the merger of biology and engineering was shaped partly by his parents—his mother is a microbiologist and his father an architect—it was inspired mainly by his prematurely born brother, whose blindness was caused by retinal damage from excessive oxygen exposure in the neonatal intensive-care ward. “What I found was that my goals were all driven by him,” he says. “I wanted to work on the retinal implant project at MIT, right from year one as an undergraduate.”

 

Anthony Goldbloom

Anthony Goldbloom

Anthony Goldbloom

Anthony JohnGoldbloom, 30, is the founder and CEO of Kaggle, a Silicon Valley start-up which has used predictive modeling competitions to solve problems for NASA, Wikipedia, Ford and Deloitte. Kaggle has improved the state of the art across a range of fields, including mapping dark matter and HIV research.

Anthony Goldbloom had been a data analyst when he founded Kaggle, a startup that helps companies outsources thorny problems to data crunchers like him. Yet when he was launching Kaggle, he relied on no data at all. He just figured it would work. As more and more companies began putting forward challenges, more and more data geeks joined Kaggle to vie for the opportunities. Now the user base exceeds 100,000, large enough to give the company another revenue stream: for a fee, it will match up companies with specific top performers.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

2 of 7
Use your ← → (arrow) keys to browse
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Some More Sauce...

Entertainment

News of the arrest of popular disc jockey Joe Mfalme in connection with the fatal assault of a senior police officer has taken the...

Entertainment

It is the eve of a new tiding for Director Trevor, as he gets hot in the heels spearheading his now rebranded news channel,...

Da Squeeze

Is there possibly one thing that Lisa Christoffersen cannot do? Seems unlikely. Having defied odds and beat stage 4 cancer 18 years ago, her...

Da Squeeze

Kenyan rap bigwig Khaligraph Jones is utterly disappointed after his much-hyped Instagram Live session with American rap star Rick Ross failed to happen. The...

Entertainment

Wizkid has requested people stop referring to him as an Afrobeats artist. The Nigerian singer – whose real name is Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun –...

Da Squeeze

The devil works hard, but Brian Chira’s friends, acquaintances and fans work harder! Within hours of launching, the departed TikToker’s funeral fundraiser has amassed...

Entertainment

Shakira thinks she “probably” won’t find love like she had with Gerard Piqué again. The 47-year-old singer split from the former soccer star –...

Entertainment

Catherine, Princess of Wales has announced she is undergoing “preventative” chemotherapy for cancer. The 42-year-old royal – who is married to Prince William and...