Susan Solomon

Susan Solomon’s health care advocacy stemmed from personal medical trials -- namely, her son's Type 1 diabetes and her mother's fatal cancer. Following a successful career as a lawyer and business entrepreneur, Solomon, frustrated by the slow pace of medical research, was inspired to use those skills to follow another passion: accelerating medical research with real-world results as a social entrepreneur. And through her own research and conversations with medical experts, she decided that stem cells (cells that have the ability to morph into any other kind of cell) had the greatest potential to impact peoples’ health.

In 2005, Solomon founded the New York Stem Cell Foundation, one of the largest nonprofit research institutions and laboratories in this field in the world. The NYSCF Research Institute conducts all facets of stem cell research from growing the cells to drug discovery.

At TEDGlobal 2012, Solomon announced the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array, a technology to create thousands of stem cell avatars and genetically array them. The aim of this work is to functionalize the data from the human genome and revolutionize the way we develop cures and treatments so they are better, safer, less expensive and happen much more quickly.