Dina Katabi Named to Forbes 50 Over 50 Innovation List
MIT Professor and Jameel Clinic Principal Investigator Dina Katabi has been recognized on the 2026 Forbes 50 Over 50 list in the Innovation category, highlighting her pioneering work at the intersection of wireless sensing, artificial intelligence, and healthcare.
The Forbes 50 Over 50 celebrates 200 women who are making some of their most ambitious and influential contributions after age 50. Spanning four categories — Impact, Innovation, Investment, and Lifestyle — the 2026 list recognizes leaders who are challenging conventional ideas about what innovation and achievement can look like at every stage of a career.
Katabi’s recognition reflects the transformative potential of applying machine learning to healthcare. She has dedicated her career to developing new ways to extract meaningful information from wireless signals, such as the early detection of Parkinson’s from nighttime breathing patterns and developing new biomarkers for Rett syndrome. Her research has evolved from improving Wi-Fi and cellular networks to using wireless signals and machine learning to monitor human health.
Furthermore, her lab has developed technology that can passively monitor the human body without requiring a wearable device, capturing information such as sleep and breathing patterns, heart rate, and movement. The technology has the potential to make health monitoring more accessible and less intrusive, while providing new ways to understand changes in a person’s health over time.
Katabi is also co-founder and president of Emerald Innovations, which is bringing this research beyond the lab through an at-home wireless health-monitoring system. Her work has previously earned numerous honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
As a member of the MIT Jameel Clinic, Katabi exemplifies the Clinic’s mission to harness the power of machine learning to transform healthcare and improve human health. Her research demonstrates how advances in AI and sensing technologies can move from fundamental research toward practical tools with the potential to change how health is monitored and managed.
Her inclusion in the Forbes 50 Over 50 is a recognition not only of her accomplishments, but of the continued possibilities for innovation at the intersection of AI, technology, and medicine.
