New York, NY—August 21, 2013: MIT Technology Review today revealed its prestigious annual list of 35 top young innovators, which includes Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor Christine Fleming. Selected from hundreds of nominations, she is being honored as an outstanding inventor on the list for her work in the field of biotechnology and medicine.
"I am thrilled to receive such a notable recognition of my work," says Fleming, whose research is focused on developing optical imaging and spectroscopy instruments for applications in cardiac electrophysiology and interventional cardiology. "I hope this will draw attention to cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of mortality in the United States—it's critical that we continue to develop technologies to detect abnormalities at early stages and develop effective therapies to treat this pervasive illness."
Fleming is working on giving cardiologists a powerful new tool: high-resolution films of the living heart, available in real time during cardiac procedures. To do this, she is using optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive imaging technique that provides depth-resolved, high-resolution images of tissue microstructure in real-time, and designing flexible catheter probes to image various parts of the body, including the heart chambers.
"You can think of OCT as 'optical ultrasound'," she says. "It provides imaging reflections from within tissue to provide cross-sectional images, at a much higher resolution than other imaging techniques such as MRI or ultrasound."
Fleming hopes her technology will help doctors find the source of irregular heart rhythms, develop more effective therapies without invasive biopsies, improve early diagnosis, and even monitor treatment.
Fleming joined Columbia Engineering in 2012 after completing her doctoral work at Case Western Reserve University and post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, Fleming developed signal and image processing algorithms to identify cholesterol deposits within OCT images of coronary arteries.
For more than a decade, MIT Technology Review's Annual INNOVATORS UNDER 35 List has recognized exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world. "Over the years, we've had success in choosing women and men whose innovations and companies have been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs," says editor in chief and publisher Jason Pontin. "Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple; and David Karp, the creator of Tumblr. We're proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate, and we're proud to add Christine to this prestigious list."
This year's honorees will be featured online at technologyreview.com starting today, and in the September/October print magazine, which hits newsstands worldwide on September 3. They will appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference from October 9 to 11 in Cambridge, MA (http://www.emtechmit.com).
Columbia Engineering
Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, founded in 1864, offers programs in nine departments to both undergraduate and graduate students. With facilities specifically designed and equipped to meet the laboratory and research needs of faculty and students, Columbia Engineering is home to NSF-NIH funded centers in genomic science, molecular nanostructures, materials science, and energy, as well as one of the world's leading programs in financial engineering. These interdisciplinary centers are leading the way in their respective fields while individual groups of engineers and scientists collaborate to solve some of modern society's more difficult challenges. http://www.engineering.columbia.edu/
MIT Technology Review
MIT Technology Review leads the global conversation about technologies that matter. An independent media company owned by MIT, it produces publications read by millions of business leaders, innovators, and thought leaders around the globe, in six languages and on a variety of platforms. The company publishes MIT Technology Review magazine, the most respected technology magazine; daily news features, analysis, and opinion; and Business Reports, which explain how technologies are transforming industries. It produces live eventssuch as the annual EmTech MIT, international EmTech conferences, Summits, and Salons. The company's entrepreneurial community organization, MIT Enterprise Forum, hosts 400+ events a year around the world.