Principal Investgator 

Professor Loza Tadesse

I am an Assistant Professor at MIT MechE and an associate member at the Ragon Institue of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. My lab develops next generation disease diagnostic modalities for extreme environments such as resource limited settings, space exploration and military field sites. As a medical student in Ethiopia, I experienced firsthand the gravity of challenges in resource limited clinical settings. This instilled a strong interest in me for a career in engineering point-of-care medical devices. My PhD work at Stanford developed a rapid, all-optical and label-free bacterial diagnostic and antibiotic susceptibility testing system preventing the time-consuming culturing steps in gold standard methods. I combined machine learning and a light scattering approach called Raman spectroscopy to fingerprint bacterial species even in their natural liquid environment. I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in Prof. Laura Waller’s lab developing diagnostic optical tools employing computational optics design and machine learning to enable medical grade diagnostics design from simple optical components. Prior to graduate school, I was a researcher at IBM Almaden and Los Alamos National Laboratories. When not in lab, I am heavily involved in teaching and outreach including, chairing the 2022 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Plasmonics and Nanophotonics, and leading Scifro, an educational non-profit running on $350K grants from major partners including the Gates Foundation aiming to inspire African youth to solve local problems using STEM.