During its annual meeting on October 20, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members, including MIT faculty members Dina Katabi and Facundo Batista, as well as three additional MIT alumni.
Election to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.
Facundo Batista is Associate Director and Scientific Director of the Ragon Institute at MGH, MIT, and Harvard, as well as the first Philip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor in the MIT Department of Biology. The National Academy of Medicine recognized Batista “for his work to better understand the biology of antibody-producing B cells and how our body’s immune system responds to infectious disease.” Recently, Facundo’s research has advanced preclinical vaccine and therapeutic development for globally significant diseases including HIV, malaria and influenza.
Battista received his PhD from the International School of Advanced Studies and set up his own laboratory in 2002 as a member of the Francis Crick Institute (formerly the London Research Institute), as well as holding a professorship at Imperial College London. In 2016, he joined the Ragon Institute to pursue a new research program to apply his expertise in B cells and antibody responses to vaccine development, and preclinical vaccinology for diseases including 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 Ciências de América Latina, and the European Molecular Biology Organization, and he is editor-in-chief of the American Academy of Microbiology. EMBO Journal,
Dina Katabi SM ’99, PhD ’03 is the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research spans 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. NAM recognized Katabi for “pioneering digital health technology that enables non-invasive, off-body remote health monitoring via AI and wireless signals, and for developing digital biomarkers to detect and detect Parkinson’s progression. She has translated this technology into clinical trials to advance objective, sensitive measures of disease trajectory and treatment response.”
Katabi is the director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. She is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she leads a network in the MIT Research Group. Kataabi received a bachelor’s degree from Damascus University and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT. He is a MacArthur Fellow; Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering; and recipient of the ACM Computing Award.
Additional MIT alumni who were elected to the NAM for 2025:
- Christopher S. Chen SM ’93, PhD ’97, alumnus of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology;
- Michael E. Matheny SM ’06, alumnus of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; And
- Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum SM ’87, PhD ’90, and alumnus of the Department of Physics and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Originally established as 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 action in all fields.
NAM President Victor J. “I am deeply honored to welcome these extraordinary health and medical leaders and researchers to the National Academy of Medicine,” says Dazau. “His demonstrated excellence in tackling public health challenges, leading breakthrough discoveries, improving health care, advancing health policy, and addressing health equity will critically strengthen our collective ability to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our time.”
