Jose Gomez-Marquez

Mackenzie Cowell explains a cricket-leg sound wave recording device he made to Jose Gomez-Marquez (right) of MIT's D-Lab.

José Gomez-Marquez (born 1976) is a Honduran inventor, researcher, and educator and is best known for empowering medical professionals with MEDIkits.[1] He currently serves on the European Union's Science Against Poverty Initiative Task Force.[2] He's dedicated to changing global health and advocates for healthcare professionals.[1]

Early life and education

Before entering the United States, Gomez-Marquez was a native of Honduras.[3] He is from a medical family, his grandfather was a surgeon who served in different hospitals in Tegucigalpa where Gomez was raised.[3] Gomes-Marquez observed the impact medical devices could have for improving access to healthcare after spending a childhood with frequent doctor visits due to health concerns related to his premature birth.[4] After entering the United States on a Rotary scholarship in 1997, Marquez attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where he studied policy research covering international technology, transfer and small-team innovation.[2]

Career and research

Jose Gomez-Marquez observed inventive behaviors during his time in Nicaragua when hospital staff utilized unconventional materials such as cut-up soda bottles as drainage valves and layered surgical gauze, to create neonatal UV protectors.[5] These experiences inspired his mission to empower inventiveness and access to tools in impoverished communities.[5] Gomez-Marquez developed a way to extract parts from toys and use these to build medical instruments for children at low cost.[6] He also designed a way for people to build their own diagnostic devices that can be put together inexpensively.[7] The cofounder of the International Development Initiation at MIT, Amy B. Smith, hired him in 2007 to run Innovations in International Health.[6] Marquez is currently the co-director of Little Devices Lab at MIT, a research group focused on developing affordable medical device hardware, increasing accessibility, and empowering frontline healthcare providers to design medical technologies.[1] Jose is the creator of the first course on affordable medical device hardware at MIT.[8] He is one of the cofounders of MakerNurse, a community of inventive nurses creating solutions to improve patient care, established in 2013.[9] He is also cofounder of LDTC+ Labs, and serves on the European Union's Science Against Poverty Initiative Task Force.[2] One of his many inventions that won him awards are individual vaporizers that come already filled with the appropriate amount of vaccine.[3] These vaccines didn't need to be refrigerated and could be disposed of right after usage.[3]

Awards and honors

Gomez-Marquez is a three-time MIT IDEAS Competition winner including two Lemelson Awards for International Technology.[2] In 2009, he was named the Technology Review Humanitarian of the year and MIT Technology Review added him to the TR35 list of innovators under 35.[10] In 2011, Gomez-Marquez was chosen as a TedGlobal Fellow.[2] He won these awards for his designs of inexpensive practical medical devices for use in countries without the necessary monetary means to provide similar devices.[6]

Selected publications

  • Marquez, Jose G. "Ampli: A Construction Set for Paperfluidic Systems" published 2018
  • Jose Gomez-Marquez, Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli: "Distributed Biological Foundries for Global Health" published 2019[11]
  • Innovations in International Health

References

  1. ^ a b c "Jose Gomez-Marquez Wants to Turn Doctors and Nurses into Makers". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  2. ^ a b c d e "José Gómez-Márquez | BMW Guggenheim Lab". www.bmwguggenheimlab.org. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
  3. ^ a b c d Singer, Emily (2009-08-18). "José Gómez-Márquez". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2024-03-30.
  4. ^ "TR 35". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 2025-02-19. Retrieved 2025-10-19.
  5. ^ a b MIT, José Gómez-Márquez is Program Director for the Innovations in International Health Initiative at; D-Lab, Instructor at MIT’s (2011-03-14). "Encouraging Inventiveness". Boston Review. Retrieved 2025-10-19.
  6. ^ a b c "How toys can save lives | CNN Business". CNN. 2012-03-27. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
  7. ^ Trafton, Anne (2018-05-16). "Plug-and-play diagnostic devices". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 2024-03-03.
  8. ^ "Our People – MIT Little Devices Lab". Retrieved 2025-10-19.
  9. ^ Nuwer, Rachel (2016-04-14). "The First Makerspace In A Hospital". Popular Science. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
  10. ^ Singer, Emily. "José Gómez-Márquez | Innovators Under 35". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2024-03-30.
  11. ^ Gomez‐Marquez, Jose; Hamad‐Schifferli, Kimberly (2019-08-16). "Distributed Biological Foundries for Global Health". Advanced Healthcare Materials. 8 (18). doi:10.1002/adhm.201900184. ISSN 2192-2640.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.