On Oct. 20 during its annual meeting, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 latest members, including MIT faculty members Dina Katabi and Facundo Batista and three other MIT alumni.
Election to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is taken into account one among the best honors within the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who’ve demonstrated outstanding skilled achievement and commitment to service.
Facundo Batista is associate director and scientific director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard and the primary Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor within the MIT Department of Biology. The National Academy of Medicine recognized Batista for “his work unraveling the biology of antibody-producing B cells to raised understand how our body’s immune system responds to infectious diseases.” More recently, Facundo's research has advanced preclinical vaccine and therapy development for globally essential diseases corresponding to HIV, malaria and influenza.
Batista earned a PhD from the International School of Advanced Studies and founded his laboratory in 2002 as a member of the Francis Crick Institute (formerly the London Research Institute) while also holding a professorship at Imperial College London. In 2016, he joined the Ragon Institute to pursue a brand new research program applying his expertise in B cells and antibody responses to vaccine development and preclinical vaccinology for diseases corresponding to SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. Batista is an elected fellow or member of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Academia de Ciencias de América Latina and the European Molecular Biology Organization and is Editor-in-Chief of.
Dina Katabi SM '99, PhD '03 is the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Her research includes digital health, wireless sensing, mobile computing, machine learning and computer vision. Katabi's contributions include efficient communication protocols for the Internet, advanced contactless biosensors, and novel AI models that interpret physiological signals. The NAM recognized Katabi for “pioneering digital health technology that allows non-invasive distant monitoring of health status outside the body via AI and wireless signals, and for the event of digital biomarkers for Parkinson's progression and detection. She has implemented this technology to supply objective, sensitive measurements of disease progression and response to treatment in clinical trials to maneuver forward.”
Katabi is director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. She can also be a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she leads the MIT Research Group networks. Katabi received a bachelor's degree from the University of Damascus and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT. She is a MacArthur Fellow; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering; and a recipient of the ACM Computing Prize.
Other MIT alumni elected to the NAM for 2025 include:
- Christopher S. Chen SM '93, PhD '97, a graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology;
- Michael E. Matheny SM '06, a graduate of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program; And
- Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum SM '87, PhD '90 and a graduate of the Department of Physics and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Originally established because the Institute of Medicine in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine addresses critical issues in health, science, medicine and related policy and inspires positive motion in all sectors.
“It is my great honor to welcome these exceptional health and medical leaders and researchers to the National Academy of Medicine,” said NAM President Victor J. Dzau. “Their demonstrated excellence in addressing public health challenges, leading essential discoveries, improving health care, advancing health policy and advancing health equity will significantly strengthen our collective ability to handle essentially the most pressing health challenges of our time.”
