Fan Yang
MIT’s Technology Review has named two Stanford professors and two alums to its 2011 list of “35 Innovators Under 35.”
The faculty winners are FAN YANG, assistant professor of bioengineering and orthopedic surgery, and JENNIFER DIONNE, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. PIYA SORCAR, who holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Stanford School of Education, and PIETER ABBEEL, who holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford, were the alumni winners. (Editor’s note: After this item was published, a reader alerted us that Abbeel, who is on the faculty at Berkeley, has a Stanford connection.)
The winners join the ranks of Google founders LARRY PAGE and SERGEY BRIN and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.
Yang studies how the body repairs blood vessels damaged by heart attacks, strokes and diabetic ulcers. She has developed a biodegradable polymer that binds to DNA to form nanoparticles that can then penetrate stem cells in order to release their cellular instructions. The polymer eventually degrades naturally, producing a safer outcome than current viral techniques.
As for Dionne, whose research focuses on solar technology, the magazine notes: “Other solar researchers have tried to do what Dionne is doing—’upconversion’—by combining two dyes that interact with each other to convert two low-energy photons into one high-energy photon. But Dionne is taking a new approach that could improve upconversion efficiencies by as much as 50 percent. She added metal nanoparticles to an existing combination of upconversion dyes; the particles shine more light on the dyes and get more converted light out of them.”
Piya Sorcar
Sorcar, the CEO and founder of TEACHAIDS, has developed interactive software to teach children about the disease in culturally sensitive and age-appropriate ways. According to the article, Sorcar’s software has been approved by states in India where other sex education programs are banned. Botswana has approved it for every school in that nation. Sorcar hopes to distribute it to countries around the world within five years.
Abbeel has figured out a way to get robots to infer the “intent” of the instructions they get. “For example,” the article said, “Abbeel taught one robot how to fold laundry by giving it some general rules about how fabric behaves, and then showed it around 100 images of clothing so it could analyze how that particular clothing was likely to move as it was handled. After that, the robot could fold towels and sweaters without further instruction.”
— By Andrew Myers and Elaine Ray
