Loza Tadesse


Loza F. Tadesse, Ph.D.

d'Arbeloff Assistant Professor

MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

Associate Member, Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 3-455B

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA, 02139

lozat@mit.edu | lozafekadu@gmail.com

I am an Assistant Professor at MIT MechE and an associate member at the Ragon Institue of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. My lab develops next generation disease diagnostic modalities for extreme environments such as resource limited settings, space exploration and military field sites. As a medical student in Ethiopia, I experienced firsthand the gravity of challenges in resource limited clinical settings. This instilled a strong interest in me for a career in engineering point-of-care medical devices. My PhD work at Stanford developed a rapid, all-optical and label-free bacterial diagnostic and antibiotic susceptibility testing system preventing the time-consuming culturing steps in gold standard methods. I combined machine learning and a light scattering approach called Raman spectroscopy to fingerprint bacterial species even in their natural liquid environment. I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in Prof. Laura Waller's lab developing diagnostic optical tools employing computational optics design and machine learning to enable medical grade diagnostics design from simple optical components. Prior to graduate school, I was a researcher at IBM Almaden and Los Alamos National Laboratories. When not in lab, I am heavily involved in teaching and outreach including, chairing the 2022 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Plasmonics and Nanophotonics, and leading Scifro, an educational non-profit running on $350K grants from major partners including the Gates Foundation aiming to inspire African youth to solve local problems using STEM.


Publications

1. L.F. Tadesse, C. Cundy, B. Ogunlade, A. Shuaibi, A. Barczak, S. Ermon, N. Banaei, S.S. Jerey, A.A.E.

Saleh, J.A. Dionne, "Rapid determination of antibiotic susceptibility of M. Tuberculosis and E.coli with

Raman spectroscopy and deep learning." to be published. 2022


2. F. Sar, N. Vu, L.F. Tadesse, B.P. Khuri-Yakub, S.S. Jerey, A.A.E. Saleh, J.A. Dionne, "Raman based identication of single cells enabled by acoustic printing of plasmonic nanoparticles with biological media." under revision Nano Letters.


3. L.F. Tadesse, C. Ho, D-H. Chen, H. Arami, N. Banaei, S. Gambhir, S.S. Jerey, A.A.E. Saleh, J.A.Dionne, "Plasmonic and electrostatic interactions enable uniformly enhanced liquid bacterial surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).", Nano Letters, 20 (10) 7655-7661 (2020) ACS Editors' Choice


4. L.F. Tadesse, F. Sar, C. Ho, X. Hasbach, B.P. Khuri-Yakub, S.S. Jerey, A.A.E. Saleh, J.A. Dionne, "Towards Rapid Infectious Disease Diagnosis with Advances in Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy.", Journal of Chemical Physics, 152 (24), 240902 (2020)


5. A.A. E. Saleh, L.V. Poulikakos, M. L. Solomon, J. M. Abendroth, L.F. Tadesse, J.A. Dionne, "Nanophotonic Platforms for Chiral Sensing and Separation.", Accounts of Chemical Research, 53 (3), 588-598 (2020) Journal Cover


6. A. E. Sifain, L.F. Tadesse, J.A. Bjorgaard, D.E. Chavez, O.V. Prezhdo, R. Jason Schar, and Sergei Tretiak, "Cooperative enhancement of the nonlinear optical response in conjugated energetic materials: A TD-DFT study." The Journal of Chemical Physics, 146 (11), 114308 (2017)


7. D. Oh, K. Virwani, L.F. Tadesse, Mark Jurich, N. B. Aetukuri, L. E. Thompson, H. Kim, and D. S. Bethune, "The Eect of Transition Metal Oxide Cathodes on the Oxygen Evolution Reaction in Li-O 2 Batteries." The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 121 (3), 1404-11(2017)


8. D. Oh, C . Ozgit-Akgun, E. Akca, L.E. Thompson, L. F. Tadesse, H. Kim, G. Demirci, R.D. Miller, H. Maune, "Biotemplating pores with size and shape diversity for Li-oxygen Battery Cathodes." Nature Scientic Reports, 7, 45919 (2017)

Select Awards

  1. Forbes 30 under 30 Healthcare 2022

  2. ACS Editor's Choice feature 2020

  3. Gates Foundation Call to Action $200K grant for Scifro inc 2020

  4. ACR Journal Cover 2020

  5. First place Stanford BIOX best poster award 2020

  6. BMES Career Development Award 2019

  7. Stanford NIH Biotechnology Predoctoral Training Grant Program Admission 2018

  8. Stanford Biodesign Next Grant for LILAC project 2018

  9. Minnesota High Tech Association Foundation STEM Scholar and Tekene Award, state-wide 2014

  10. Undergraduate Honors Apprenticeship Scholarship, highest honor 2014

  11. Exceptional Academic Performance Recognition Certicate, Medical school 2012

Patents

  1. Antibiotic co-incubation free susceptibility testing, in preparation. 2022

  2. Label-free, real-time, whole-cell response monitoring with liquid Raman spectroscopy. Filed, Appl. No.: PCT/US2021/048668. 2021

  3. Biotemplating pores with size and shape diversity for Li-oxygen Battery Cathodes. Porous sheets US20180050913A1, 2018