Neil Gershenfeld is a professor at MIT and the head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms

Center for Bits and Atoms

The Center for Bits and Atoms was established in 2001 in the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The cross-disciplinary center broadly looks at the intersection of information to its physical representation....

, a sister lab spun out of the popular MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

. His research interests are mainly in interdisciplinary studies involving physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 and computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, in such fields as quantum computing, nanotechnology

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...

, personal fabrication, and other research areas. His lab is currently located in the E15 building at MIT

Wiesner building

The Wiesner Building in Cambridge, Massachusetts houses the MIT Media Lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms , the Department of Architecture's Program in Art, Culture and Technology and the List Visual Arts Center. It was designed by I.M. Pei & Partners...

. His books include When Things Start to Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, The Physics of Information Technology, and Fab, The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (ISBN 0-465-02745-8). In 2004, Gershenfeld was named to the Scientific American

Scientific American

Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

 50. The magazine has also named him Communications Research Leader of the Year. Classes at the Center include "How To Make (almost) Anything" (MAS 863) and "How To Make Something That Makes (almost) Anything" (MAS 961).

Neil Gershenfeld received a B.A. degree in physics with high honors from Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He was previously a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows

Harvard Society of Fellows

The Harvard Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginning of their careers by Harvard University for extraordinary scholarly potential, upon whom distinctive academic and intellectual opportunities are bestowed in order to foster their individual growth and intellectual...

 and a member of the research staff at AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

's Bell Laboratories.

Neil lives with his wife and twin daughter and son Eli Cole Gershenfeld and Grace Eva Gershenfeld in Somerville, MA.

See also

• Digital fabricator
• Desktop manufacturing
• GIK
  GIK
  The Great Invention Kit is a construction set, like Lego, but using a different type of assembly principle. It was first developed by Eli, Grace, and Neil Gershenfeld in their house....
  
  
• Cluster-weighted modeling
  Cluster-weighted modeling
  In statistics, cluster-weighted modeling is an algorithm-based approach to non-linear prediction of outputs from inputs based on density estimation using a set of models that are each notionally appropriate in a sub-region of the input space...
  
  
• Internet 0
  Internet 0
  Internet 0 is a low-speed physical layer designed to route 'IP over anything.' It was developed at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms by Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, and Danny Cohen...
  
  

External links

• Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director, The Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT
• Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT
• MIT press release
• How to make (almost) anything, The Economist, Jun 9th 2005
• Desktop manufacturing | Fabulous fabrications | Economist.com
• TED Talks: Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs at TED
  TED (conference)
  TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"....
  
  
• Programming Bits and Atoms Google TechTalk by Neil Gershenfeld, 27 October 2009]
• Live broadcast of Neil Gershenfeld on The Agenda with Steve Paikin at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival, with Raymond Laflamme, Jaron Lanier and Neal Stephenson.
• Programming Bits and Atoms - video of Neil Gershenfeld's lecture at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival, 2009.