Presentation Type: Keynote

Professor Fink holds a B.A. in Physics and a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the Technion and a PhD from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is the recipient of multiple awards, among them the National Academies Initiatives in Research (2004), the MacVicar Fellowship (2007) for outstanding teaching, and the Collier Medal (2016).

Professor Fink is a co-founder of OmniGuide Surgical Inc. (2000) a MA based medical device company that develops, manufactures and markets precision optical scalpels for minimally invasive surgery. He served as its chief executive officer from 2006–2010. OmniGuide scalpels have been used in over 300,000 procedures for treating cancer of the airways and brain, endomytriosis adebilitating gynecological disease and to restore conductive hearing loss.

Fink served as the Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics from 2011-2016. As the Lab Director he initiated the Translational Fellows Program, a postdoc venture program to facilitate research-derived ventures, and the Low Cost Renovation (LoCRS), and during his tenure, the Lab became fully endowed.

In 2015, Fink led MIT’s $317M winning proposal for the creation Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) Institute a public-private-partnership backed by industry, academia, government and is aimed at accelerating a widespread commercialization of highly functional fabrics. Fink served as the Founding CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) from 2015-2019.

Fink is the coauthor of over 120 scientific journal articles and holds over fifty issued U.S. patents on multimaterial fibers, fabrics devices and fabrics. Fink is teaching the new course “Fabric Computing” at MIT.

Matthew Greenhouse has served on the James Webb Space
Telescope senior staff as Project Scientist for the Webb science
instrument payload since 1997. He specializes in infrared imaging
spectroscopy, development of related instrumentation and
technologies, flight project science, and technical management.
Greenhouse began work in infrared astronomy during 1979
when, after receiving a Bachelor’s of Science degree in
Geosciences from the University of Arizona, he joined the
Steward Observatory as an instrument technician for balloonborne and Kuiper Airborne Observatory science instrument
development. During 1983, he joined the Wyoming Infrared
Observatory as a graduate student in physics. After receiving a
Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wyoming during 1989, he
joined the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC as a Federal
Civil Service astrophysicist. He then joined the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center during 1996 in the same capacity.
Team Biographies
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Greenhouse has served on several NASA and European Space
Agency (ESA) flight mission teams. He supported ESA’s Infrared
Space Observatory mission as a member of the Long Wavelength
Spectrometer instrument team. He supported the NASA
Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy mission by
serving on its Independent Annual Review Board as Co-Chair, and
served on both its Interim Management Review Board, and
Science Steering Committee. He supported the NASA Spitzer
mission by serving on its Community Task Force as Legacy
Science Program Chair and the Hubble Space Telescope Wide
Field Camera 3 instrument project by serving on numerous
gateway technical review boards. Greenhouse has been a
member of the NASA Astrophysics Working Group, and has
supported ground-based astronomy through membership on the
National Science Foundation Committee of Visitors, and
numerous selection committees and review boards for major
ground-based instrumentation.
Greenhouse is the recipient of more than 20 individual
performance awards and honors including: the NASA Exceptional
Achievement Medal and the Robert H. Goddard award for
Exceptional Achievement in Science.
Greenhouse’s post-graduate professional training includes
completion of more than 20 courses in technical management,
public leadership, and engineering from the Brookings Institution,
The University of California Los Angeles, the NASA Academy of
Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, and the Federal
Executive Institute. Greenhouse received a Certificate in Public
Leadership from the Brookings Institution during 2012.
Greenhouse is an avid sailor. View A brief Curriculum Vita. He is
author of more than 100 publications.

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the director of UC Berkeley’s center for smart infrastructure. He is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He obtained his BEng and MEng from Kyoto University in Japan and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His current research activities are infrastructure sensing, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He is the chair of ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division’s Emerging Technologies Committee.