Canan Dağdeviren

Canan Dağdeviren is a Turkish materials scientist and physicist, born in Istanbul on 4 May 1985, and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she holds the LG Career Development Professorship in Media Arts and Sciences. She is the first Turkish scientist to become a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. At the MIT Media Lab she directs the Conformable Decoders research group, which works at the intersection of materials science, engineering and biomedical engineering, creating mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems that intimately integrate with the human body for sensing, actuation and energy harvesting. ^{1 2}

Dağdeviren was born in Istanbul to a family originally from Sivas Province, the oldest of three siblings. She completed her primary and middle schooling in İzmit; after the 1999 İzmit earthquake her family had to leave the city, and she continued her high-school education in Adana. ¹

An early inspiration was a book her father gave her on the life of Marie Curie; she became fascinated in particular by Pierre Curie's work on piezoelectricity, the principle that later drove many of her own projects. Another motivation was family: her grandfather died of heart failure at twenty-eight, and as a girl she promised herself she would one day create technology to monitor such health conditions. ¹

She studied physics engineering at Hacettepe University in Ankara, graduating in 2007, then obtained a master's degree from Sabancı University in Istanbul and won a Fulbright scholarship for study in the United States. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign she researched patterning techniques and piezoelectric biomedical systems under John A. Rogers, receiving her PhD in August 2014. ^{1 2}

After her doctorate she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows — the first Turkish scientist in the Society's history to hold that position — and at the same time as a postdoctoral research associate at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, working with Robert S. Langer. ¹

She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2017, teaches a course on conformable devices, and directs the Conformable Decoders group at the Media Lab. For her team she designed and built a transparent cleanroom she calls YellowBox, which in 2017 achieved Green Labs certification, the first research lab at the MIT Media Lab to receive it since its founding in 1985. ¹

Among her group's projects, as the article presents them:

• Conformable piezoelectric mechanical energy harvesters (2014). Flexible patches that convert the mechanical energy of internal organ movements and body motion into electric energy to power implanted medical devices, extending battery life or removing the need for replacement surgery. ¹
• Flexible piezoelectric device for gastrointestinal motility sensing (2017). An ingestible, flexible sensor that reads mechanical deformation inside the stomach, described as "a Fitbit for the stomach". ¹
• Miniaturized neural system for drug delivery (2018). An implantable, remotely controllable system that delivers drugs locally inside the brain with pinpoint spatial accuracy while recording neural activity, aimed at neurodegenerative disorders. ¹
• Electronic textile conformable suit (2020). A smart garment with a distributed sensor network woven in, measuring temperature, heart rate and respiration over large areas of the body. ¹
• Conformable facial code extrapolation sensor (2020). Piezoelectric thin films that map facial skin strain and decode facial movements, tested as a communication aid for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ¹
• Wearable ultrasound breast patch (2023). A patch that performs longitudinal imaging of breast tissue for early cancer detection, published in Science Advances. ¹

In 2015 MIT Technology Review named her among its "Innovators Under 35" in the inventor category, and Forbes selected her for its "30 Under 30" in science. She won the Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists in translational medicine in 2016, and first place in the medical innovation category of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World awards. In 2019 she received the Kadir Has University Promising Scientist Award and was listed in Fortune Turkey's "40 Under 40". In April 2021 she received both the National Science Foundation's CAREER award and the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. ¹ In 2024 she was given the Aziz Sancar Award. ³

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