Distinguished Medical Engineering Seminar - Giovanni Traverso

Location: 105 Annenberg. Zoom: https://caltech.zoom.us/j/83251899690

Medication non-adherence (non-compliance) represents a major barrier to effective clinical care. In developed nations, only 50% of patients take their medications as prescribed, manifesting in more than $100 billion in avoidable hospitalizations every year in the United States alone and the numbers are far worse in the developing world. In his seminar, Prof. Traverso will present a series of novel technologies being developed with the goal to enhance and facilitate medication administration. Specifically, Prof. Traverso will discuss the development of new technologies for the delivery of a broad set of drugs including macromolecules through the oral route.

Prof. Traverso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. Prof. Traverso grew up in Peru, Canada and the United Kingdom. He received his BA from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and his PhD from the lab of Prof. Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University. He subsequently completed medical school at the University of Cambridge, internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. Prof. Traverso's previous work focused on the development of novel molecular tests for the early detection of colon cancer. For his post-doctoral research, he transitioned to the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed a series of novel technologies for drug delivery as well as physiological sensing via the gastrointestinal tract.

His current research program is focused on developing the next generation of drug delivery systems to enable efficient delivery of therapeutics through the gastrointestinal tract as well developing novel ingestible electronic devices for sensing a broad array of physiologic and pathophysiologic parameters. Additionally, Dr. Traverso continues his efforts towards the development of novel diagnostic tests that enable the early detection of cancer. https://engineering.mit.edu/faculty/giovanni-traverso/

Host: Azita Emami