Loza Tadesse is Brit (1961) & Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of MIT Jameel Clinic. She received her PhD in bioengineering from Stanford University in 2021 and previously was a medical student at St. Paul Hospital Millennium Medical College in Ethiopia. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Tadesse’s past research combines Raman spectroscopy and machine learning to develop a rapid, all-optical, and label free bacterial diagnostic and antibiotic susceptibility testing system that aims to circumvent the time-consuming culturing step in ‘gold standard’ methods. She aims to establish a research program that develops next generation point-of-care diagnostic devices using spectroscopy, optical, and machine learning tools for application in resource limited clinical settings such as developing nations, military sites, and space exploration. Tadesse has been listed as a 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 in healthcare, received many awards including the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Career Development Award, the Stanford DARE Fellowship and the Gates Foundation “Call to Action” $200K grant for SciFro Inc., an educational non-profit in Ethiopia, which she co-founded.
