Sam Rodriques invents new technologies to help neuroscientists understand how the brain works.

Why you should listen

Sam Rodriques has invented a new nanofabrication method, a new approach to sensing neural activity with probes in the bloodstream and new ways to extract spatial and temporal information from RNA sequencing. He graduated with a PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having worked between the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Prior to that, he graduated summa cum laude with highest honors in physics from Haverford College, where he worked on new methods for calculating quantum entanglement in multipartite quantum systems. He has received numerous national awards and fellowships to support his research, including the Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Churchill Scholarship. He continues to work on a broad diversity of projects, including new brain mapping technologies and technologies for sequencing individual proteins.

Sam Rodriques’ TED talk