TED Community » Walter De Brouwer

About Me

Walter De Brouwer (°Belgium, 1957) has a background in linguistics and holds a PhD in semiotics. He was one of the founders of Ping (Eunet) which merged with Qwest communications in 1998 to become the third long-distance carrier in the US. In 1996 his electronic recruitment site went up in Stepstone which did a successful IPO on LSE. De Brouwer was the founder of Europe’s private (deep-future) fundamental research facility, STARLAB which entered into cult after Financial Times said that it attracted “the world’s brainiest nerds” and Discovery Channel had called it “Nerd Heaven”. Together with Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier he worked on Benveniste Bio in France (a quantum biology lab) and with Marc Milles formerly with NASA, the Tau Zero, on non-propulsion physics. Since 2004 he is Entrepreneur in Residence (Cfel) with the Judge School at Cambridge University.

De Brouwer is the founder and the CEO of Scanadu, a NASA-Ames based mhealth private laboratory that together with NASA intends to create the mythical ‘tricorder’ out of Star Trek, which would be able to scan one’s health in real-time 24/7, non-invasively and not using any bodily contact. Corriere della Sera called De Brouwer the “Woody Allen del business”.