Popular Science’s ‘The Brilliant 10 of 2016’ Part 4

This is the 15th year Popular Science has searched nationwide to find the 10 “most innovative young minds in science and engineering.” Below is a brief outline of 3 of this year’s Brilliant 10 of 2016. 

Suchi Saria – 33 year old Saria studies health information and machine learning at Johns Hopkins University. A long-time lover of algorithms, Saria always “wanted [her] work to more directy impact people’s lives.” Enter her work with the health records of premature newborns. The goal of her alogrithms was to find patterns that could better predict the medical future for any given patient. She’s created a system for predicting which premature babies will require the most medical attention, is developing an algorithm to help patients with autoimmune disorders and just last year she and her team developed an algorith to serve as the first-ever early-warning system for septic shock. Read more about Saria’s work here. 

William Ratcliff – 35 year old Ratcliff studies evolutionary biology at Georgia Tech. He is working with single-celled yeast to gain insight into what might have been necessary for how single cells come together to form multicellular organisms. The cells Ratcliff works with sometimes make copies of themselves that don’t separate but stay attached, “forming lacy multicellular structrues called snowflakes.” Read more about Ratcliff’s work here. 

Siddharth Garg – Garg is a 34-year-old electrical and computer engineer at New York University, and he’s solved a problem many people have probable never considered possible: “Hackers can tweak a microchip so when a certain trigger occurs, it throw open the gates for attackers to commandeer – or destroy – the device in which that chip is embedded,” according to Popular Science. By strategically divvying up the fabrication of the microchips among multiple manufacturers. “That way, nobody can know they’ve got the piece that hackers could take advantage of.” Read more about Garg’s work here.