Past Funded Researchers
Ian Hunter
- George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in Thermodynamics
- Department of Mechanical Engineering
Prof. Ian W. Hunter was born in New Zealand and had an early interest in science, engineering and instrumentation from a young age. After graduating from the University of Auckland with BSc, MSc and PhD degrees he completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University, Canada. He then joined the faculty of McGill and founded the BioInstrumentation Laboratory. In 1994 Prof. Hunter moved the laboratory to the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with five graduate students. In the last 20 years the laboratory has quickly expanded in space, facilities and breadth of projects.
Over the years Prof. Hunter and his students have developed many instruments and devices including: confocal laser microscopes, scanning tunneling electron microscopes, miniature mass spectrometers, new forms of Raman spectroscopy, needle free drug delivery technologies, nano- and micro-robots, micro-surgical robots, robotic endoscopes, high performance Lorentz-force motors, and micro-array technologies for massively parallel chemical and biological assays. These efforts have resulted in over 500 publications and over 150 issued and pending patents. These inventions have been used by numerous companies, over 25 of which Prof. Hunter founded or co-founded.
Professor Hunter is part of a sponsored research project funded in 2018 through the J-WAFS Research Affiliate program.