Mary Lou Jepsen
Inventor, entrepreneur, optical physicist
Mary Lou Jepsen pushes the edges of what's possible in optics and physics, to make new types of devices, leading teams and working with huge factories that can ship vast volumes of these strange, new things.
Why you should listen
Mary Lou Jepsen is one of the world’s foremost engineers and scientists in optics, imaging and display -- inventing at the hairy, crazy edge of what physics allows, aiming to do what seems impossible and leading teams to achieve these in volume in partnership with the world’s largest manufacturers, in Asia. She has more than 200 patents published or issued.
Jepsen is the founder and CEO of Openwater, which aims to use new optics to see inside our bodies. Previously a top technical exec at Google, Facebook, Oculus and Intel, her startups include One Laptop Per Child, where she was CTO and chief architect on the $100 laptop. She studied at Brown, MIT and Rhode Island School of Design, and she was a professor at both MITs -- the one in Cambridge, Mass., and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Tech in Australia.
Mary Lou Jepsen’s TED Talks
More news and ideas from Mary Lou Jepsen
Live from TED2018
Body electric: Notes from Session 9 of TED2018
April 13, 2018
During the week of TED, it’s tempting to feel like a brain in a jar — to think on a highly abstracted, intellectual, hypertechnical level about every single human issue. But the speakers in this session remind us that we’re still just made of meat. And that our carbon-based life forms aren’t problems to be […]
Continue readingIn Brief
A spacecraft’s final mission … and other news from TED speakers
April 7, 2017
Please enjoy your weekly roundup of TED-related news: Good luck and farewell to the Cassini spacecraft. Launched 20 years ago, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will begin its final mission on April 26. The spacecraft will embark on a series of 22 dives through the space between Saturn and its rings, transmitting data that may help us […]
Continue readingFeatured feedback
From the comments: A world of unfiltered communication — using just our thoughts?
May 9, 2014
Stroke survivor Jok Church shared his response to Mary Lou Jepsen's thought-provoking TED Talk examining new ways in which we might think and communicate in the future.
Continue reading