Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji Srinivasan, 33,realized thatscreening prospective parents for recessive diseases could be the first big hit in clinical genomics. No company performs more genomic screens for medical use than Counsyl, a startup cofounded by BalajiSrinivasan. It scans the DNA of parents in 3 percent of all births in the United States.
Every year, three out of every 1,000 children are born with a genetic disease, such as cystic fibrosis, that did not afflict the parents—who most likely unknowingly carried a defective copy of a particular gene. If both parents carry a damaged copy, there is a 25 percent chance that their child will have the disease. Balaji’s inventions help reduce that possibility.
Kuniharu Takei
Kuniharu Takei, 32, a professor at Japan’s Osaka Prefecture University, has led the development of cheap and robust methods for “printing” uniform, ultrathin patterns of different types of nanoelectronics on a wide range of surfaces.
Takei’s goal is to build circuits and sensor networks that simultaneously exploit the properties of several materials, each chosen because it offers a specific advantage. Nanomaterials made of compound semiconductors could be used to add high-speed radio-frequency components and efficient light emitters to silicon chips. But there is not yet a way to cheaply and reliably add such nanoscale components. Existing strategies involve highly specialized procedures for growing these materials on silicon or attaching them to silicon wafers; such methods are expensive and may not be practical for manufacturing. Printing processes like Takei’s could be an attractive alternative.
Evans Wadongo
Evans Wadongo
Growing up in Kenya, he strained to read by the dim light of a kerosene lantern. Now Evan’s Wadongo, 27, is making solar-charged lanterns and using them to spur economic development.Kenya’s unreliable electric grid doesn’t reach some rural parts of the country. Yet an economic transformation is taking place, driven by an unlikely source—solar-charged LED lanterns. It can be traced to the vision of Evans Wadongo, 27, who grew up in a village.
Wadongo now heads Sustainable Development for All, the NGO that gave him his leadership training, and he is focusing it on expanding the lamp production program. It has made and distributed 32,000 lamps and is poised to increase that number dramatically by opening 20 manufacturing centers in Kenya and Malawi. Wadongo says that teams in those centers will independently manufacture not only the lamps but “any creative thing they want to make.”
Amos Winter
Amos Winter, 33, is lately renowned for having created a wheelchair specially tuned to the needs of people in poor countries: sturdy enough for uneven terrain, nimble enough to negotiate the indoors. The idea emerged when he was an MIT grad student visiting Tanzania in 2005; within three years he’d worked up a prototype to take back for a test run. That’s when his real education began. The chair was too heavy, users complained. It was too unwieldy to use inside. It wasn’t stable enough on hills. He thus worked towards developing a better and lighter one. His current project is developing reliable artificial heels.
Feng Zang
Zhang, 31, is an assistant professor at MIT and one of only 11 core faculty members at the Broad Institute, a leading center of genomic research. He’s spent much of his brief but impressive career developing tools to understand how the brain functions, including what goes wrong in people with mental illnesses. As a graduate student at Stanford, he played a key role in developing optogenetics, which uses light to affect the behavior of living animals by controlling specific neurons; he then used the technique in mice to pinpoint brain cells that are associated with depression.
