35 Innovators Under 35 2014

All 35 of these people are doing exciting work that could shape their fields for decades. But they’re solving problems in remarkably different ways. We consider some of them to be primarily Inventors; they’re immersed in building new technologies. Others we call Visionaries, because they’re showing how technologies could be put to new or better uses. Humanitarians are using technology to expand opportunities or inform public policy. Pioneers are doing fundamental work that will spawn future innovations; such ­breakthroughs will be taken up by tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, ­people who are building new tech businesses.

Everyone on the list was nominated either by the public or by MIT Technology Review’s editors. Some got our attention when they were picked by our international publishing partners as Innovators Under 35 for their regions. After our editors pared the roughly 500 nominees to 80 finalists, outside judges rated the originality and impact, or potential impact, of their work; those scores guided the editors as they crafted the list.

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David Berry, Partner, Flagship Ventures; Edward Boyden, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute; Yet-Ming Chiang, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT; James Collins, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University; John Dabiri, Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, Caltech; Jennifer Elisseeff, Professor of Biomedical; Engineering, Johns Hopkins; Javier García-Martínez, Director of Molecular Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Alicante, Spain; Julia Greer, Professor of Materials Science and Mechanics, Caltech; Eric Horvitz, Managing Director, Microsoft Research; Hao Li, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California; Cherry Murray, Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University; Kristala Jones Prather, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT; Carmichael Roberts, Entrepreneur and General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; John Rogers, Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science Engineering, University of Illinois; Umar Saif, Vice Chancellor, Information Technology University, Punjab; Laura Schewel, Cofounder and CEO, StreetLight Data; Rachel Sheinbein, Managing Director, Balfour Asset Management; Sophie Vandebroek, CTO, Xerox; Ben Zhao, Professor of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara