Italy Inspires Canada
Lecture by Fiorenzo Omenetto
Natural materials offer new avenues for innovation across fields, bringing together, like never before, natural sciences and high technology.
Significant opportunity exists in reinventing naturally-derived materials, such as structural proteins, and applying advanced material processing, prototyping, and manufacturing techniques to these ubiquitously present substances. This approach help us imagine and realize sustainable, carbon-neutral strategies that operate seamlessly at the interface between the biological and the technological worlds.
Some of these opportunities include biomaterials-based applications in edible and implantable electronics, food preservation, energy harvesting, wearable sensors, compostable technology, distributed environmental sensing, medical devices and therapeutics, biospecimen stabilization, advanced medical diagnostics, and will be outlined in this talk.
Click here to watch Fiorenzo Omenetto’s TED talk.
Read here the article on the WIRED.
April 17, 2019 – 6:30pm
Muzzo Family Alumni Hall. Dept. of Italian Studies University of Toronto 121 st. Joseph.
Free admission – Click here to register
Italy Inspires Canada is a series of lecture, two per year, to showcase Italy at the forefront of science, art and technology.
The Italian Research Day in the World is an initiative launched by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) to promote the important work of Italian scientists and researchers in the World.
Fiorenzo G. Omenetto is the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering, and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. He also holds appointments in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in the convergence of technology, biologically inspired materials and the natural sciences with an emphasis on new transformative approaches for sustainable materials for high-technology applications. He also serves as Dean for Research for the School of Engineering. He has proposed and pioneered the use of silk as a material platform for advanced technology with uses in photonics, optoelectronics and nanotechnology applications, is co-inventor on several disclosures on the subject, and is actively investigating applications that rely on this technology base both for technical and design applications. He has co-founded three startups and his technology has been licensed by major corporations.
Prof. Omenetto was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratories, a Guggenheim Fellow. He is a 2017 Tällberg Foundation Global Leader, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Physical Society. He was named one of the 50 top people in tech by Fortune magazine alongside a class including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Jeff Bezos to name a few. His research has been featured extensively in the press with coverage in the most important media outlets worldwide.