Emery N. Brown is professor of health sciences and technology in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He is also Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1987 and a PhD in statistics from Harvard University in 1988.

His research focus is the development of signal processing algorithms to characterize how the patterns of electrical discharges from neurons in the brain and central nervous system represent and transmit information. Since receiving a 2007 NIH Director's Pioneer Award, he has been using a systems neuroscience approach to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia. His approach uses combined functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography.

He serves on the National Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, the Board of Mathematical Sciences and its Applications of the National Research Council and the Board of Trustees of the International Anesthesia Research Society.

Cell-cell recognition in immunology, T-cell biology and human immune response to HIV, membranes, statistical mechanics, computational immunology

Arup K. Chakraborty is the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biological Engineering at MIT and a founding member of the Ragon Institute of MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard.

After obtaining his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Delaware and completing postdoctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in December 1988. He rose through the ranks, ultimately serving as the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Distinguished Professor and Chair of Chemical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biophysics at Berkeley. He was also head of theoretical and computational biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Chakraborty moved to MIT in September 2005. His research over the past 10 years has focused on developing and applying theoretical and computational approaches to studying the function of T lymphocytes, orchestrators of the adaptive immune response. A characteristic of his work is its impact on experimental immunology, and more recently, clinical studies (he collaborates extensively with leading immunologists). Chakraborty’s work at the interface of the physical, life and engineering sciences has been recognized with many honors, including an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the E. O. Lawrence Memorial Award for Life Sciences, the Allan P. Colburn and Professional Progress awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, a Miller Research Professorship, and a National Young Investigator Award. Chakraborty is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Michael J. Cima is a professor of materials science and engineering. He earned a BS in chemistry in 1982 (Phi Beta Kappa) and a PhD in chemical engineering in 1986, both from the University of California at Berkeley.

Cima joined the MIT faculty in 1986 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to full pzrofessor in 1995. He was elected a fellow of the American Ceramics Society in 1997. He now holds the Sumitomo Electric Industries professorship at MIT. He is author or co-author of more than 190 peer-reviewed scientific publications, 45 patents, and is a recognized expert in the field of materials processing.

Cima is actively involved in materials and engineered systems for improvement human health such treatments for cancer, metabolic diseases, trauma and urological disorders. Cima's research concerns advanced forming technology for complex macro and micro devices, colloid science, MEMS and other micro components for medical devices that are used for drug delivery and diagnostics, as well as high-throughput development methods for formulations of materials and pharmaceutical formulations. He is a co-inventor of MIT’s three-dimensional printing process. His research has led to the development of chemically derived epitaxial oxide films for HTSC coated conductors. He and collaborators are developing implantable MEMS devices for unprecedented control in the delivery of pharmaceuticals and implantable diagnostic systems.

Finally, through his consulting work, he has been a major contributor to the development of high-throughput systems for discovery of novel crystal forms and formulations of pharmaceuticals. Cima also has extensive entrepreneurial experience. He is co-founder and a director of MicroChips Inc., a developer of microelectronic-based drug-delivery and diagnostic systems. He took two sabbaticals to act as senior consultant and management team member at Transform Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that he helped start and which was ultimately acquired by Johnson & Johnson. He is a co-founder and director at T2 Biosystems, a medical-diagnostics company. Most recently, Cima co-founded Entra Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical company, and Taris Biomedical, a urology products company.

Joel l. Dawson is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received the SB in electrical engineering from MIT in 1996, and the MEng degree from MIT in EECS in 1997. He went on to pursue further graduate studies at Stanford University, where he received his PhD in electrical engineering for his work on power amplifier linearization techniques.

Before joining the faculty at MIT, Dawson spent one year at a startup company that he co-founded. He continues to be active in the industry as both a technical and legal consultant. Dawson received the NSF CAREER award in 2008, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2009.

Stan N. Finkelstein, MD, is a senior research scientist at MIT and co-director of the Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry (POPI). He also serves as a senior lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a member of the faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and the MIT Engineering Systems Division (ESD).

He received his SB and SM degrees in chemical engineering from MIT in 1971, and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1975. Since 1975, he has worked actively in the field of medical technology assessment and transfer at MIT. He conducts research and teaches classes in the development and evaluation of medical practice and technology and in health economics and policy, both at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

Alan Grodzinsky is currently the director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering and is professor of biological, electrical, and mechanical engineering at MIT.

His research interests include the degeneration and repair of cartilage in injured and arthritic joints, cellular mechanotransduction, molecular nano-mechanics, tissue engineering, and the influence of physical forces on gene expression and matrix biosynthesis in musculoskeletal tissues. He has published more than 230 journal articles and reviews in these fields, and was elected founding fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

He is past chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Musculoskeletal Biology and Bioengineering, and past president of the Orthopaedic Research Society and the International Cartilage Repair Society. He has been on the editorial boards of the Journal of Orthopaedic Research, Archives Biochemistry Biophysics, Polymer Networks and Gels, Arthritis and Rheumatism, and is now on the board of Osteoarthritis and Cartilage. He received the NIH MERIT Award, the ASME Melville Medal, the Kappa Delta Research Prize of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the Borelli Award of the American Society of Biomechanics (ASB), and the Honorary Doctorate of the University of Montreal, and numerous other awards. He has been on the Science Advisory Boards of Smith and Nephew, ISTO Technologies, and Tissue Engineering Inc., and is a scientific co-founder of 3D-Matrix. He has been a consultant for 40-plus industrial and academic institutions.

David Jones completed his AB at Harvard College in 1993 (History and Science), and then pursued both a PhD in history of science at Harvard University and an MD at Harvard Medical School, receiving both in 2001. After an internship in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, he trained as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and then worked for two years as a staff psychiatrist in the Psychiatric Emergence Service at Cambridge Hospital. 

In 2005, he joined the faculty at MIT, where he is now sssociate professor of the history and culture of science and technology. From 2004-2008, Jones directed the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine at MIT, organizing a successful series of conferences about race, science and technology. In 2009, he was appointed as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He also teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

His initial research focused on epidemics among American Indians, resulting in a book, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2004), and several articles. Jones has also examined human subjects research, Cold War medicine, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and the history of cardiac surgery. His current research explores the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics, attempting to understand how cardiologists and cardiac surgeons implement new technologies of cardiac revascularization. This research is supported by an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and by the National Science Foundation.

Sebastian Seung is professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics; investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and external member of the Max Planck Society.

He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering, and a McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Scholar.

He serves on the Advisory Committee of the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Advisory Board and Steering Committee of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His laboratory is inventing technologies for finding the connectome — the neural equivalent of the genome, comprising all the connections between the brain’s neurons. In 2007, he introduced connectomics to thousands of neuroscientists in his presidential lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. To introduce this emerging field to the general public, he is writing a book that will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the fall of 2011.

Collin M. Stultz is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT. Stultz received an AB from Harvard College in 1988, and an MD from Harvard Medical School as well as a PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1997. He is a board-certified internist and cardiologist. 

An alumnus of the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology, Stultz is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He is a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Among his honors are being a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in Biomedical Sciences and the James Tolbert Shipley Prize.