Canan Dagdeviren

Born: 1985

Country of Birth: Turkey

Nationality: Turkish

Ethnicity: White

Hacettepe University (Ankara) BS Physics Engineering 2007; Sabanci University (Istanbul) MS Materials Science & Engineering 2009; University of Illinois Urbana-champaign PhD Materials Science & Engineering 2014; MIT Postdoc

" "Like bees, my students work at the intersection of nature, art, and science, drawing on both their experiences in diverse fields of science and engineering and also their diverse cultural backgrounds, much as the bees draw nectar from a host of different flowers. They then apply their minds, hearts, and hands to create unique micro- and nano-scale, mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems for human health monitoring—their scientific "honey." (Wikipedia); after winning both the NSF CAREER & 3-MNon-Tenured Faculty awards in 2021 she noted, the combination of these two awards is significant, because they will allow her to "make substantial scientific and leadership contributions to the emerging field of widely deployed biosensing tools, and to achieve a broader understanding of soft tissue in a collective and systemic way for improved human health." (Wikipedia); ". . .I love to ask questions. Asking questions helps to expand the world when it starts to shrink; it prompts people to find the right solutions for real world problems, to implement their dreams, to find out what they are good at, to expand their networking and to save time." (tr.usembassy.gov); "

— Canan Dagdeviren

Field of Study: Materials Science

Institution/Corporation: MIT; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degrees & Memberships: Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University; Society of Women Engineers

Awards: Fulbright Scholarship; 2021 NSF CAREER Award; 2021 Non-Tenured Faculty Award, 3_M; 2015 named 1 of the Top 35 Innovators Under 35, MIT Technology Review; 2015 1 of the Top 30 Under 30 in Science, Forbes magazine; 2016 named Spotlight Health Scholar, Aspen Institute; 2016 named a Gifted Citizen, Ciudad de las Ideas of Puebla Mexico; 2016 1st in Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World (TOYP) Medical Innovation Category, Junior Chamber International (JCI); 2017 Innovation & Technology Delegate of the American Academy of Achievement Award; Science & Sci Life Prize for Young Scientists in translational Medicine Category, Science/AAAS & SciLifeLab; 2019 Kadir Has University Promising Scientist Award; named 1 of US's 87 Brightest Young Engineers, National Academy of engineers (NAE); 2019 named 1 of Fortune Turkey's 40 Under 40; 2023 named to the BBCs 100 Women list; 2014 TASSA Young Scholars Awards

Achievements: MIT professor who led a team to develop a wearable breast cancer device that screens for breast cancer; she & her team have developed numerous diagnostic & medical tools that are conformable & easy to wear (see Innovations for a more complete list); 2019 used media, art, & science to create an exhibition displaying her student's work titled "The Bees of Science" that was featured in the lobby of the MIT Media Lab for 8 months