Innovators Under 352015
There’s more than one way to read these stories. Sure, the subjects are inspiring and creative people. But these are not merely personality profiles. They also illustrate the most important emerging technologies of the moment. In biomedicine, for example, we feature several people who are figuring out in detail how the brain works and how we might stave off mental disorders. Others are unearthing knowledge about cancer that might open new avenues for treatment. Meanwhile, as robotics and artificial intelligence make astonishing progress, innovators in those fields are showcased here. So are people who are cleverly taking advantage of the falling cost of sensors and bandwidth.The selection process for this package begins with hundreds of nominations from the public, MIT Technology Review editors, and our international partners who publish Innovators Under 35 lists in their regions. Our editors pare the list to about 80 people, who submit descriptions of their work and letters of reference. Then outside judges rate the finalists on the originality and impact of their work; that feedback helps the editors choose this group.
Inventors
Yunji Chen
Improvements in artificial intelligence call out for new hardware.
Canan Dagdeviren
A master of flexible sensors and batteries sees opportunities for a new class of medical devices.
Lisa Seacat DeLuca
A software engineer makes a habit of going after everyday problems.
Travis Deyle
He has built robots that can be powered wirelessly and ones that can bring people medication. Now Google has him trying to use technology to improve health care.
Richard Lunt
Making invisible solar cells for electronic devices requires some exceptional creativity.
Rohan Paul
To create an affordable obstacle detection system for blind people, he began by simply asking them what they needed.
Jamie Shotton
He gives computers new ways to see the world.
Benjamin Tee
A synthetic sense of touch could help both people and machines.
Conor Walsh
This robotics researcher might have something in just your size.
Entrepreneurs
Patrick Collison
He and his brother started Stripe to make money flow easily online.
Jini Kim
A stint helping the government altered her view of her health-care business.
Dena Marrinucci
Her startup bets it can track cancer from an early stage, without any biopsies.
Rikky Muller
Hardware that buzzes the brain at the right moments could help treat debilitating mental disorders.
Ben Rubin
The cofounder of a live-streaming video app explains what makes it tick.
Kevin Systrom
Instagram’s cofounder maintains his sharp focus.
Melonee Wise
Affordable robots for the warehouse and beyond.
Visionaries (2015)
Lars Blackmore
Would space travel flourish if we could reuse the rockets?
Adam Coates
Artificial intelligence could make the Internet more useful to the millions of people coming online for the first time.
Zakir Durumeric
A computer scientist sees a way to improve online security.
Cigall Kadoch
A major vulnerability of certain kinds of cancer is becoming clear.
Ilya Sutskever
Why one form of machine learning will be particularly powerful.
Humanitarians
Yevgen Borodin
A software tool conceived for blind people could offer an intuitive way for anyone to listen to online material.
Duygu Kayaman
What her parents did for her, she hopes to do for many other blind people.
Rahul Panicker
This engineer from India returned home after graduate school with a new approach to helping premature babies.
Saurabh Srivastava
Voice and gestural interfaces could make digital technologies available to the world’s poorest people.
Rebecca Steorts
Big data could cut through the fog of war.
Pioneers
Polina Anikeeva
A creative scientist sees new ways to record and stimulate brain activity.
Gozde Durmus
It’s amazing what you can learn about a cell when you levitate it.
Gilad Evrony
Single-neuron genome sequencing is revealing clues about what goes wrong in the brain.
Jeannette Garcia
A chance discovery sparked a quest for plastics that are both strong and recyclable.
Jun Ge
Why we might use tiny flowers, trees, and spindles to create the pharmaceuticals of the future.
Zhen Gu
Diabetics are tired of sticking themselves with needles. Someday they may not have to.
Elizabeth Mormino
A telltale protein seen in people’s brains before they have Alzheimer’s could offer a clue about possible treatments.
Michelle O’Malley
Understanding a tricky kind of single-cell creature could help reduce the cost of biofuels.
Aaswath Raman
Your next air-conditioning system might save energy by beaming heat into outer space.