20 Under 40: Young Shapers of the Future (Health and Medicine)
The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social and political leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2022), the 200 shapers of the future that we will highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in times to come.
Lurit Bepo (33)
Lurit Bepo was born in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 1990. Her first name, she explains, “is a name from my family’s Bari ethnic group that is traditionally given to the first born female into the family.” With her mother and four siblings, she immigrated to the United States when she was six years old, joining her father, who had been living in Texas and studying for a master’s degree in electrical engineering. After completing a degree in biology and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, she entered the joint master’s of public health/doctor of medicine program at Emory University in Atlanta. A resident at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, she is working in internal medicine, but, she says, “my ideal goal is to move into the health policy world.”
Miguel Villavicencio Camarillo (~33)
Born in Mexico, Miguel Villavicencio Camarillo earned a doctorate in pharmacology in 2018 from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. In 2020 he was honored with a Pew Latin American fellowship, which carries with it a postdoctoral grant. He is now at the Zuckerman Institute of Columbia University. His research centers on the brain circuitry involved in the human appetite for sugar—circuitry whose first node is in the gut, from which information about dietary sugars is carried directly to the brain. In experimental conditions, sugars can yield a sufficient reward or sense of pleasure to the brain such that they might one day be used to manage depression. Villavicencio is investigating both how sugar elevates mood and how its absence can conversely trigger anxiety or depression. Villavicencio’s work has implications for a host of biologically based sciences, from neurology to nutrition studies and psychiatry.
Kizzmekia S. Corbett (34)
Born in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, Kizzmekia Corbett took a strong interest in science as a child. While enrolled at Orange High School in Hillsborough, she spent two summers as an intern doing chemistry research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then, the summer after her first year at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), she interned at Stony Brook University, in New York, studying how disease develops from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis bacteria. In addition, she worked as a lab technician at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. After receiving a B.S. in biological sciences and sociology from UMBC, Corbett earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from UNC-Chapel Hill, writing her dissertation on the dengue fever virus in Sri Lankan children. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Later, as a member of the faculty at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, Corbett headed the team that worked with the biotechnology company Moderna to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, building on her extensive studies of spike proteins in similar viruses. It took her team only 66 days to get the vaccine to the clinical trial phase of the U.S. government’s drug review process. “The first thing…to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman,” said U.S. infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci when the Moderna vaccine went to market in 2020.
Habib Frost (31)
Habib Frost was just 23 when he graduated from the University of Copenhagen’s medical school in 2014—the youngest person to become a physician in Denmark’s history. The same year, he was certified in advanced trauma life support by the American College of Surgeons, and two years later, in 2016, he completed the course in strategic management at the Copenhagen Business School. His education addresses a broad range of interests: not only is he a well-known trauma surgeon, but he is also an entrepreneur and inventor who in 2014 founded a company called Neurescue, which develops computer-aided medical devices to treat cardiac arrest and hemorrhaging, using a combination of novel medical hardware and software. Frost works at the frontier of technology and medicine, using sensors, robotics, and gene-editing technology. The company’s trademarked Neurescue device is a computer-controlled balloon catheter, which, once inserted into the femoral artery, helps redistribute the blood flow during the process of administering CPR to trauma patients.
Rachel Haurwitz (36)
Rachel Haurwitz grew up in Austin, Texas, where she developed a strong interest in science as a child. She received a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Harvard College, then went on to secure a doctorate in molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley she was drawn to the gene-editing technology developed there called CRISPR. In 2012, working with a developer of that technology, she joined Caribou Biosciences, founded as a commercial enterprise by scientists at Berkeley, and became its chief executive officer. CRISPR has since been used to edit genes in plant, animal, and human cells, while revealing many applications, whether modifying plants to become drought-resistant or warding off genetic diseases in humans. Some of the company’s technologies are also being used in livestock production through partnerships with Novartis and other firms. An inventor as well as an entrepreneur, Haurwitz holds several patents covering CRISPR-derived technologies.
Manuella Kaster (39)
Born in Florianópolis, Brazil, Manuella Pinto Kaster received a bachelor of science degree in biology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) there, then went on to complete a doctorate in neuroscience. She did postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and the University of Coimbra in Portugal. She is now an associate professor of biochemistry at UFSC. Her research uses basic science and clinical studies to understand the biological mechanisms associated with stress vulnerability and psychiatric disorders; its specific goal is to identify the biological mechanisms associated with stress and depression and their effects on the neural and immune systems. This research has led to a number of significant papers that explore the impact of stress on mood and cognitive dysfunction, disorders that are considered to be at epidemic levels worldwide. She was named a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Leen Kawas (36)
Born in Jordan, Leen Kawas received a doctorate in pharmacy and chemistry from the University of Jordan, having been inspired to enter the healthcare field following the death of a beloved grandmother that was caused by cancer. She moved to the United States to study toxicology and molecular pharmacology at Washington State University, receiving a doctorate in 2011. She then became vice president of research at M3 Biotechnology (later renamed Athira Pharma), a drug development company striving to improve human health by advancing new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. The company’s aim is to restore neuronal health for those who are afflicted by neurological diseases so that they can regain their memories and return to living happier and more productive lives. In 2014 she became the company’s president and CEO and also completed her studies at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. In 2020 Kawas became the first woman in more than 20 years to take a Washington-based company public, having raised more than $100 million in venture capital.
Becky Kennedy (38)
Born in White Plains, New York, Becky Kennedy earned a B.A. in psychology and human development from Duke University and then attained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Columbia University, training at Bellevue Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She also holds a certificate in relational psychotherapy from the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. After establishing a private practice in Manhattan and becoming a mother of three, she was asked frequently for advice from fellow millennial parents, so she embraced the role of Dr. Becky and developed a series of workshops and publications that encourage such parents to reimagine child-rearing. As she explained to The New York Times, parents and children are strangers to each other. “Does anyone know how to be in a permanent relationship with a stranger whom they’re supposed to love and nourish? So, sure, everyone is just winging it, but they’re also looking to feel believed and supported and not alone.” When children act out, she holds, it is because they are experiencing big novel feelings often driven by fear and anxiety. Within just a couple of years Dr. Becky’s Instagram account had more than 800,000 followers, and her podcast Good Inside with Dr. Becky launched in April 2021 and immediately rose to number 1 on the Apple Podcasts Kids & Family chart. Kennedy’s goal in providing these resources, she says, is to nurture stronger connections between parents and children.
Maria Isabel Layson (18)
After attending an elementary school for gifted children and the Singapore American School, Maria Isabel Layson returned to her native Iloilo City, in the Philippines, and enrolled in an advanced science curriculum at the National High School there. While studying an abundant berry locally called aratiles or sarisa in a Food and Nutrition Research Institute laboratory in Manila, Layson discovered that the fruit contains antioxidant compounds that combat diabetes. In 2019, when she was 16, she presented her findings at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona, as one of a dozen Filipino delegates. That year she won Best Individual Research in Life Science at the National Science and Technology Fair hosted by the Philippines Department of Education. Layson is now a student at the University of the Philippines Visayas in Iloilo City, where she also operates a bakery that makes keto-friendly pastries.
Laura Lewis (~34)
Laura Lewis studied cognitive science at McGill University in Montreal, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 2008; she completed a doctorate in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Tehnology in 2014. As a member of Harvard University’s Society of Fellows, she studied how neural signaling works in sleep and altered states of consciousness and under anesthesia. She has developed advanced methods of using neuroimaging data and computational processing to study how the brain functions under conditions such as neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, allowing new ways to measure and analyze brain activity. Now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and the recipient of numerous scholarly awards, she is researching why it is that the brain requires sleep. She discovered that a major function is to clear out metabolic waste products such as beta-amyloids and proteins by washing them out with cerebrospinal fluid in slow-wave sleep. These waste byproducts are removed less thoroughly as humans age, which may have bearing on the development of Alzheimer and other neurodegenerative diseases. One lesson of her research is that healthy sleep may help protect people from such disorders.
[Read the stories of 20 people under 40 who are changing the future of science and technology.]
Kevin Lyman (29)
A graduate of Middlesex County Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering in New Jersey, Kevin Lyman completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 2015. While still in college, he founded the Inventors Guild, a think tank where students could earn both money and course credit for developing products and founding technology companies. He went on to one such startup in 2015, becoming an engineer for Enlitic, a San Francisco–based company that uses AI to read radiological scans. He became chief operating officer in 2017 and a year later was named the firm’s chief executive officer. Enlitic’s emphasis includes making more efficient use of computational resources in diagnostic healthcare, developing software tools that better allow physicians and support staff to use the vast body of data collected on patients through images, tests, and medical notes.
Salome Maswime (38)
Salome Maswime was born in Limpopo, the rural northernmost province of South Africa, where her father was a professor of theology at the University of Venda. She long aspired to become a doctor, earning a medical degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2005. She went on to receive a master’s degree and doctorate in obstetrics and gynecology from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research sought ways to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality from caesarian section–related bleeding during childbirth—a major cause of maternal deaths on the African continent that, she feared, was being worsened by methods of medical care. In 2018 she was awarded a fellowship from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she expanded her studies to investigate the incidence of stillborn babies with HIV-positive mothers. The following year she became an associate professor and head of global surgery at the University of Cape Town. A pioneer in delivering medical services to remote and underserved populations, she has served as president of the South African Clinician Scientists Society and was honored by South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. “I am mindful that if we get things right in Africa, the impact of our work could be truly global,” she told The Lancet.
Divya Nag (30)
The eldest child of immigrants from the Indian city of Jaipur, Divya Nag grew up in El Dorado Hills, a suburb of Sacramento, California. Fascinated by science from an early age, she enrolled in junior college at the age of 13, studying mathematics. While still in high school, she became an assistant at a nanomaterials lab at the University of California at Davis, researching how near-microscopic particles could be used to suppress wildfires that ravage California. She enrolled at Stanford University, studying cell biology, but dropped out at the age of 20 to start a company called Stem Cell Theranostics, building on research that she had been doing on regenerating heart cells through the use of stem cells. Her dream, as she recounted, was to develop the ability at the cellular level to repair hearts instantly following a heart attack. She later founded StartX Med, a nonprofit medical innovation accelerator program, which, as of 2022, had incubated more than 135 health technology companies and raised more than $920 million in venture capital funding. Now director of health at Apple, she is an inaugural recipient of the Mic 50 Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement by millennials.
Sarah Park (14)
Sarah Park is a mathematical and musical prodigy who has won several competitions for her violin and piano playing as well as for her numeracy. As a middle-school student in Jacksonville, Florida, she noticed that many of the people around her were suffering from stress and unhappiness because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. She also noticed the comforting effect that music had on a grandmother who was having mental health issues. To help people with such problems, Park applied her talents to developing a prototype for a device she calls Spark Care+. This small electronic device employs a standard anxiety and depression scale to assess the user’s mental state. It then scans for stress indicators such as elevated heart rate and blood pressure. According to these results, an AI algorithm recommends music to alleviate the user’s symptoms, and it monitors the effect of that music as it is played. Both personalized and portable, Spark Care+ uses deep neural networks to improve mental health through music therapy. Its heart is an open-source Arduino electronic prototyping platform. For this invention, Park won the $25,000 grand prize in the 2021 3M Young Scientist Challenge. She hopes to continue her studies in robotics and biotechnology to take the prototype to market as an even smaller, wristband-mounted device.
Rodney Perez (~32)
A native of the Philippines, Rodney Perez studied food science at Visayas State University, on the island of Leyte, and then won a scholarship to Kyushu University, in Japan, where he earned an M.S. in bioscience and biotechnology and a Ph.D. in microbial technology. His specialty as a researcher at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of the Philippines Los Baños is the study of bacteriocins, naturally occurring toxins that can kill related strains of bacteria implicated in food poisoning and spoilage. Perez is now working on technologies to introduce these bacteriocins as part of food packaging processes—for instance, replacing artificial and potentially harmful steroids in dairy products with helpful bacteria from lactic acid that combat mastitis in cattle. Perez has received several honors for his work, including the Young Asian Biotechnologist award from Japan’s Society for Biotechnology. He is the first Filipino to have earned that vaunted international prize. Perez has expressed his intent to bring microorganisms to bear on other health-related problems in his country. “With microbial technologies,” he says, “we are able to make these tiny microorganisms work for us.”
Leila Pirhaji (35)
A native of Iran, Leila Pirhaji received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tehran in biotechnology. In 2010 she moved to the United States and earned a doctorate in biological and biosystems engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; she also studied in MIT’s Sloan Executive Education program. While still in Iran, she developed an algorithm that used gene expression data to predict how those genes would be regulated, with implications for the biomarkers of disease and medical applications. In 2017 she founded the Boston-area firm ReviveMed, an artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery platform that is focused on discovering therapeutics for metabolic diseases such as diabetes and fatty liver diseases. Hitherto, only some 5 percent of metabolites could be measured using existing technologies, but, with the application of machine learning, Pirhaji demonstrated that many more of the body’s 100,000 metabolites could be analyzed. The platform can be used to develop pharmaceutical treatments for other maladies, such as autoimmune disorders.
Krithik Ramesh (18)
An aspiring physician, Krithik Ramesh was a 16-year-old student in a Denver-area high school when he won first prize at the 2019 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, earning a $75,000 purse. His winning invention was a software program combining machine learning and augmented reality to help guide surgeons in spinal reconstruction. His tests showed that the program was correct nearly 97 percent of the time, a marked improvement over older methods. Ramesh’s program helped make screw placement more accurate, and it saves more than 30 minutes of operating time, with a corresponding reduction of recovery time by as much as four weeks. The program relies on a headset that depicts what the patient’s spine should look like once the surgery is completed, freeing surgeons from the relative guesswork of X-rays and freeing the patient from the intrusive radiation required by the now-unneeded exploratory tool called the fluoroscope. Ramesh is currently working on a diagnostics platform to help cardiologists detect congenital heart disease in utero. A student of physics and engineering as well as medicine, Ramesh conducted research in modeling turbulence at the Boeing Corporation and has founded a philanthropic organization in his parents’ native India to provide solar electricity to rural schools.
Erin Smith (~36)
Erin Smith began to take an interest in how the endocrine system works while studying kinesiology and exercise science at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces. While working as a health educator in Denver, Colorado, she took a master’s degree in nutrition, then moved to New Zealand to undertake doctoral study in endocrinology at the University of Otago in Wellington, fine-tuning her research to investigate what a developing baby experiences while in the womb and how maternal health can be promoted to ward off chronic diseases. Her doctoral research indicates, among other things, that fructose consumption during pregnancy has direct effects on the metabolism of the fetus and subsequent development. Smith is active in several organizations around the developmental origins of diseases, and in 2015 she was invited by the World Health Organization to help prioritize research questions in the study of obesity and metabolic disorders among children and adolescents.
Humsa Venkatesh (34)
The child of immigrants to the United States, Humsa Venkatesh became interested in medicine when an uncle in India died of cancer only a short time after being diagnosed. She studied chemical biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate from Stanford University in 2017 in oncological biology. She was the lead author of a 2015 paper in the journal Cell that revealed that the growth of tumors could be stimulated by neural activity in the cerebral cortex, indicating that malignant tumors are linked by networks that electrically integrate with the brain and that they use the power of this neural circuitry to enhance their growth. Her postdoctoral research in neurology at Stanford, centering on the microenvironments in which tumors develop and grow, now focuses on how this electrical connection can be rewired. Her goal is to apply her findings to other brain malignancies whose treatment might involve new therapies that can target many kinds of cancer.
Sho Yano (30)
A definitive child prodigy, the son of a Japanese father and a Korean mother, Sho Yano is the youngest person ever to have graduated with a doctorate in medicine from the University of Chicago, having done so at the age of 21—a year or two before most students enter medical school. He had already received a Ph.D. in molecular biology several years earlier, in 2009. Before that, Yano entered college when he was just nine years old, graduating from Loyola University in Chicago summa cum laude at the age of 12. He holds a black belt in tae kwon do and is a concert-level pianist, levels of accomplishment that his younger sister echoed, completing her first bachelor’s degree, in biology, when she was 13 years old and her second, in violin performance, four years later. Now licensed to practice medicine in Illinois and Washington, D.C., Dr. Yano specializes in pediatric neurology.