Neil Gershenfeld Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms

Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds.

He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Designing Reality, Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of 40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.

He's been called the intellectual father of the maker movement, founding a growing global network of over one thousand fab labs that provide widespread access to prototype tools for personal fabrication, directing the Fab Academy for distributed research and education in the principles and practices of digital fabrication, and chairing the Fab Foundation. Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College, Strathclyde University and the University of Antwerp, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.

Sherry Lassiter President & CEO, The Fab Foundation

Sherry Lassiter is one of the architects of the MIT global initiative for field on-site technology development, the Fab Lab program. A Fab Lab, or as users like to call it, fabulous laboratory, is a rapid prototyping platform for technical education, innovation, and personal expression.

The Fab Lab network includes over 2000 digital fabrication facilities in 126 countries. Lassiter is Director of the Fab Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to building technical capacity in a locality, improving individuals’ abilities to develop themselves and their communities and bringing access to tools and knowledge that cultivate and support innovating practices. After a two-decade career in science journalism as a producer, writer, and director for television series such as Scientific American Frontiers, Discover the World of Science, and The Science Times, she became a protagonist in science and technology, becoming part of the story, rather than just telling the story.

As Program Manager for the NSF-funded Center for Bits & Atoms at MIT, she has seen and enabled the personal fabrication movement as it has grown and evolved. Today she serves as Director of the global Fab Lab Program at MIT as well as leading The Fab Foundation, the non-profit spinoff from MIT. Lassiter is currently engaged in the deployment and growth of Fab Labs around the world, enabling grassroots technology development by, for and of the community.

Lara Stein Founder TEDx, CEO, Founder Regenerative Consulting

Lara Stein is a global movement builder, civic innovator, and systems entrepreneur whose work centers on one question: how do powerful ideas move from inspiration into action, from individual creativity into collective capacity, and from isolated innovation into systems change?

She is best known as the founder of TEDx, the global program that transformed TED from a single conference into a worldwide movement of locally organized events. Under her leadership, TEDx became one of the largest open-source civic and cultural platforms in the world, enabling thousands of communities to convene around ideas worth spreading and giving local organizers the tools, framework, standards, and confidence to create their own stages. TEDx was never simply an events program; it was a participatory architecture for human imagination.

Lara has spent her career at the intersection of storytelling, technology, education, and infrastructure. She understands that movements require both: a story powerful enough to inspire people and a system practical enough to let them participate. Her work has consistently explored how to build models that are rigorous enough to scale, open enough to be locally owned, and trusted enough to endure.

She has held leadership roles and advised across organizations including TED, Singularity University, MIT, Microsoft, and WGBH, helping expand global programs, future-facing learning, technology initiatives, and public-interest storytelling. Today, Lara works across civic innovation, climate and regeneration, AI, education, and social impact, developing initiatives that help communities move from passive concern to active contribution.

Across all of her work, Lara asks: how do we move people from spectatorship to authorship? How do we decentralize systems while maintaining quality, trust, and coherence? Her career has been dedicated to building platforms that activate human potential, trust local communities, and turn powerful ideas into movements.

John Glass Synthetic Biology Professor, J. Craig Venter Institute

John Glass is a Professor in the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and JCVI La Jolla Campus Director. Glass’s research team created a minimal bacterial cell with a genome comprising only the essential genes necessary for life called JCVI-syn3.0. This simplest of all microbes encodes genes from the caprine pathogen, Mycoplasma mycoides. Glass’s JCVI team as well as more than 90 other research teams are using this cell to investigate the first principles of cellular life. Additionally, from the lessons learned through building a synthetic cell with a minimal gene set JCVI synthetic biologists hope to design and create cells with properties that address human needs. Glass also directs JCVI teams that are investigating how viruses defeat antiviral components of the human innate immune system, developing a new treatment for type I diabetes based on the human skin microbiome, developing new methods for synthesis of human artificial chromosomes, and constructing large genome bacteriophage that encode gene sets to enable their use as antibacterial therapeutics. Glass earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining the JCVI in 2003, he worked in the Infectious Diseases Research Therapeutic Area at Eli Lilly from 1998-2003.

Keeril Makan Vice Provost for the Arts at MIT

Keeril Makan is vice provost for the arts and the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor at MIT, where he provides Institute-wide leadership and strategic direction for the arts. He works in close partnership with academic leaders, arts units, and administrative colleagues across the Institute to support artistic inquiry, teaching, scholarship, and public engagement.

A critically acclaimed composer, Makan’s work has been commissioned, recorded, and performed internationally by leading ensembles and institutions. His music has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and presented at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Tanglewood. His opera Persona premiered at National Sawdust and has been performed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and by the Los Angeles Opera; the Los Angeles Times described the score as “brilliant.”

Makan’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, and ASCAP. His work is widely noted for integrating contemporary technology with expressive depth and has been described by The New Yorker as “empowered by modern technology but haunted by a spirit of immemorial darkness.”

Makan joined the MIT faculty in 2006. He has served in a range of academic leadership roles, including Head of the Music and Theater Arts Section and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He has contributed to several Institute-wide initiatives, including the Future of the Arts at MIT and the MIT Human Insight Collaborative.

Trained initially as a violinist, Makan earned undergraduate degrees in music composition and religion from Oberlin College and a PhD in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley.

Phuntsho Namgay Director

Phuntsho Namgay is the Director of the Department of Innovation and Technology, DHI. Under this role, he leads the department’s efforts in developing Bhutan’s Innovation Ecosystem for tech-based and a start-up economy by leveraging Research & Development for technology with values. With an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, his experience ranges from Grass Root Innovations to Ecosystem building. He hopes to use his experience and efforts to contribute to his Majesty the Fifth’s vision of a transformed Bhutan.

Jean-michel Molenaar Director of deployment and IT

JMM is responsible for the Fab Foundation's lab deployments, it's IT infrastructure, and manages Fab Futures. He believes in the transformative power of Fab Labs and their global community, and loves cutting edge technology and long walks in the mountains.

Alan Gershenfeld Co-Founder, President, E-Line Media

Alan is President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media, a developer and publisher of video games with meaningful themes and authentic voices. E-Line’s games include the BAFTA and Peabody winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Jackson-Wild award winning Beyond Blue, Gamestar Mechanic and MinecraftEdu.

Alan has also worked on impact game projects with the Gates, MacArthur and Ford Foundations, White House OSTP, NSF, BBC, USAID, DARPA, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Games for Change, Google, Sesame Workshop, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, ASU and other organizations.

Prior to E-Line, Alan was Chairman of the Board of the nonprofit Games for Change and SVP Activision Studios, where he was a member of the executive management team that rebuilt Activision from bankruptcy into an industry leader. At Activision, Alan supervised product development at the company's LA studio. Titles released under his leadership include Civilization: Call to Power, Muppet Treasure Island, Mechwarrior 2, Asteroids 3D, Spycraft, Shanghai, Pitfall, Zork and Tony Hawk Skateboarding. Before Activision, Alan spent nearly ten years in the film industry where he worked in development, production and post-production roles on numerous feature films and documentaries.

Alan currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Impact Guild and Advisory Board for Playing for the Planet, FilmAid International, Breakthrough T1D Play, and Materiom. He was previously on the Advisory Board of PBS Next Generation Media, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, iCivics and ASU Center for Games and Impact. Alan has served as a US State Department Arts Envoy is Co-Founder of Experimental Design and Endless Studios. He has published articles on technology, media, social impact and humor in publications ranging from Scientific American to Slackjaw and is the co-Author of Designing Reality: How To Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution.

Alan is the first recipient of the Games for Change 'Hall of

Ben Vigoda CEO, Gamalon, Inc. and Research Affiliate, MIT Design Intelligence Lab

Ben Vigoda currently works on developing AI architectures for continuous learning, sample efficiency, asymptotically unlimited context windows, and long-term planning. He is the CEO of Gamalon, Inc. and Research Affiliate in the MIT Design Intelligence Lab. Previously, he was CEO and Co-Founder of Lyric Semiconductor which created the first tensor processing units (machine learning processors and compilers) and was acquired by Analog Devices. He is a Kavli National Academy of Sciences Fellow and serves on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group. He co-founded the nonprofit Design That Matters, developing technology for underserved communities. He has authored over 120 patents and academic publications, and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, EE Times, Scientific American, Wired, TechCrunch, TEDx, and other media.

Chris Bathgate Artist

Chris Bathgate

Chris Bathgate is a self-taught machinist and machine builder. He has spent twenty-five years engineering myriad metalworking tools to create intricately machined sculptures that defy easy classification. Through his work, the artist has vigorously explored “machine-work” as an active industry, vocation, and craft medium that has resisted artification for over a century. He has coined the term “studio machining” to both define his practice, and describe an emerging field within the fine arts.

His works are fundamentally engineered, every detail methodically designed from the ground up. They illustrate that creativity alone does not drive human imagination, but that inspiration comes from the need to define and overcome technical challenges. By combining the math and logistics of modern machine work with an emotive problem-solving ethic, the artist bends the physical constraints of his medium to an aesthetic that plays on ideas of utility and ambiguous design intent. The result is precise and other worldly art objects that exude a creative logic all their own.

Chris is a visiting researcher at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, and author of the book The Machinist Sculptor: Industry Meets Craft, which explores the history of Machine work and its evolving status as a fine art craft, through the lens of his pioneering sculpture practice. It serves as a contemporary reflection on the modern state of craft, and a historical corrective to the technological dogmas that emerged during the studio craft movements of the 20th century.

Tom Bodett Founder

A lifelong carpenter and woodworker in addition to his successful 40-year career in publishing and broadcasting, Tom Bodett devotes himself to serving the rural communities in which he has lived, and has always lived. In October of 2018 Tom Bodett co-founded the HatchSpace woodworking school and community workshop in Brattleboro, VT. He has not been heard from again. Until today.

Max Lobovsky Co-Founder and CEO of Formlabs

Max Lobovsky is co-founder and CEO of Formlabs. Formlabs pioneered professional desktop 3D printing with the first affordable stereolithography (SLA) printer and later made industrial selective laser sintering (SLS) technology accessible, growing into the largest professional 3D printing company founded since the 1980s. Prior to starting Formlabs, Lobovsky led the efforts at Fab@Home, one of the industry’s earliest open-source 3D printing projects, which has been instrumental in setting up labs in schools worldwide. A Forbes’ 30 Under 30 recipient and World Economic Forum Pioneer, Lobovsky holds a B.S. in Applied Engineering and Physics from Cornell University and a M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Janet Echelman

Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering to anchor public spaces across five continents five continents. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unlikely materials—from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel—blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Echelman’s unconventional path includes five years living in a Balinese village, graduate studies in both painting and psychology, and teaching at MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she received the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.”

Alfonso Parra Rubio

Alfonso Parra Rubio is a PhD candidate at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, directed by Neil Gershenfeld. His research investigates how folding and discrete assembly can be combined to design and manufacture architected materials across scales: from bulk cellular materials at the millimeter to centimeter range, to structural corrugations and actuated systems at the centimeter to meter range, up to architectural shell structures spanning meters to decameters. Central to his work is the idea of geometry not merely as a description of structure but as its method, shaping how materials and structures are designed, engineered, manufactured, and assembled.
Alongside his academic work, he founded RnKolektive, a collaborative platform for sculptural exploration that focuses on mixed-media pieces merging folding techniques with blown glass, applying the same research contributions toward more expressive ends.

Marc Raibert Executive Director of the RAI Institute and Founder of Boston Dynamics

Marc Raibert is the Executive Director of the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute) and founder of Boston Dynamics. He is a life-long roboticist, starting his career over 50 years ago as a graduate student at MIT. He spent 18 years as an academic researcher and tenured faculty at JPL, CMU, and MIT. He founded Boston Dynamics in 1992 and spent 30 years as CEO and Chairman creating dynamic robots such as BigDog, Spot, and Atlas. In 2022 Raibert founded the RAI Institute, a research lab working on the intersection of robotics and AI. Raibert is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was a founding member of AAAI, named Pioneer in Robotics by IEEE in 2022, received the Engelberger Award in 2022, and received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award in 2025. Two of Raibert’s robots were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2008 and 2012.

Alex McDowell RDI

Alex McDowell RDI is a creative director, production designer, narrative designer, and a professor. He has worked in narrative media for over 40 years designing feature films - for Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and Terry Gilliam amongst others - and animation, theater, interactive media and mixed reality.
McDowell is an advocate and originator of the cross-disciplinary narrative design system - World Building - that for more than a decade has extended this creative practice beyond media to corporate enterprise, industry, education, urban development, and social innovation.
He is Director of Narrative Design at MakeMake Entertainment Media in Los Angeles, a professor of Cinematic Practice at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, director of the USC World Building Institute & World Building Media Lab, USC William Cameron Menzies Endowed Chair in Production Design, founder of the the JUNK Consortium, Associate Professor at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He’s a UK Royal Designer for Industry, one of 200 designers that may hold the title. He’s written and talked a lot about design and storytelling, for a long time, in many places, to many people.

Janet Zucker

Janet Zucker has been producing and managing in the entertainment business for over four decades. Janet co-runs Zucker Productions with her husband, writer/director Jerry Zucker. Productions of theirs include DEAR DUMB DIARY, based on Jim Benton’s best-selling book series, MENTAL, starring Toni Collette and Liev Schreiber, FAIR GAME, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, and RAT RACE, directed by Jerry and released by Paramount Pictures. Janet’s upcoming slate includes JAGUAR, an adaption of Alan Rabinowitz’s Jaguar: One Man’s Struggle to Establish the First Jaguar Preserve, with Silent Films; David Sigal & Richard Corman’s AS YOU ARE documentary on transgender troops’ ability to serve in the US military; and the TV series BETTER LUCK BOB with Jonathan Krisel directing and Bobby Cannavale starring. Janet is also a passionate advocate for stem cell research. In 2004, she and Jerry, along with two other families, started Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative. Janet is the President of CuresNow, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting stem cell research. She is also a founder and co-chair of THE SCIENCE & ENTERTAINMENT EXCHANGE and has been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences’ Einstein Society. Jerry and Janet Zucker are co-founders of “Eyes Up”, a new US-based initiative using the power of the entertainment industry to broaden public understanding of the rising threat social media addiction and AI dependency pose to young minds.

Jerry Zucker

Jerry Zucker began his career in collaboration with his brother, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams. The team wrote and produced KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, wrote and directed the comedies AIRPLANE! and TOP SECRET!, and the television series POLICE SQUAD! They also directed the comedy RUTHLESS PEOPLE and wrote and produced THE NAKED GUN. Jerry also directed GHOST, FIRST KNIGHT and RAT RACE. As a producer, his work includes: MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING, A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, MY LIFE, FAIR GAME, FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, MENTAL, and DEAR DUMB DIARY. Jerry’s currently working on INTERMISSION!, a stage musical. In 2004, he and Janet started Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative that raised three billion dollars for stem cell research in California. In 2008, Jerry and Janet launched The Science and Entertainment Exchange in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. and still serve as co-chairs. Jerry and Janet Zucker are co-founders of “Eyes Up”, a new US-based initiative using the power of the entertainment industry to broaden public understanding of the rising threat social media addiction and AI dependency pose to young minds.

Ann Berger Valente Educational Research Manager

Ann Berger Valente is a researcher at the Lifelong Kindergarten group of the MIT Media Lab. Her work focuses on supporting the Brazilian Creative Learning Network, an organization that brings together thousands of teachers, artists, researchers, decision-makers, families, and students from across Brazil to support and promote more creative and relevant public education for all. Previously, she conducted monitoring and evaluation of educational and social development programs for UNESCO, Nike Foundation, LEGO Education, and Intel Education. She has over 40 years of experience using digital technology as a tool to expand learning opportunities in special education, regular K-12 education, and teacher professional development. Ann began using computers in the original LOGO Lab at MIT under the direction of Seymour Papert. At the time, she was involved in a project using LOGO with cerebral palsied children. She received a M.Ed. in educational technology from the Harvard School of Education and a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from the University of Campinas in Brazil.