Neil Gershenfeld

Gershenfeld says he tinkered constantly as a child and for a while wanted to attend trade school to learn welding and auto mechanics, but followed a college-prep track to Swarthmore College, where, while studying physics, he spent much of his time in the machine shop.⁠[1]

His CV shows a BA from Swarthmore in 1981, work as a technician at Bell Labs between 1981 and 1984, and MA and PhD studies at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry from 1985 to 1990.⁠[2]

He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry Society of Fellows from September 1989 to July 1992 and joined the MIT faculty in July 1992.⁠[2]

On January 17, 1997, he and Isaac L. Chuang published Bulk Spin-Resonance Quantum Computation in Science, proposing to use multiple-pulse magnetic resonance to manipulate the small deviation from equilibrium of a macroscopic ensemble’s density matrix so that it behaves like a lower-dimensional pure state, giving a complete prescription for quantum computing.⁠[3]

In 1999 Henry Holt published his 225-page book When Things Start to Think; then director of the Physics and Media Group and co-director of the Things That Think consortium at the MIT Media Lab, he described computing devices that can sense and respond to their environment.⁠[4]

Projects envisioned in the book include a “personal fabricator” working with digitized atoms, an electronic cello and wearable computers, and he argues that the digital world of the time was still immature.⁠[5]

In November 2001 the National Science Foundation awarded $13.75 million to create the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab to study how the content of information relates to its physical representation, with Associate Professor Gershenfeld as director; he also coordinated the technical program of Media Lab Asia.⁠[6]

To teach people to use the center’s digital fabrication machines, he began the course MAS.863, “How To Make (Almost) Anything,” which has been one of MIT’s most popular classes since its inception.⁠[7]

He expected a few advanced engineering students but was overwhelmed by about a hundred, many from non-technical backgrounds, who made projects such as a dress that puffs up defensively, a bag that records screams and a web browser for parrots.⁠[1]

In 2003 he met the civil rights activist Mel King about an NSF outreach project and went on to set up the first community fab lab at King’s South End Technology Center in Boston; labs followed in Ghana, South Africa, northern Norway and rural India.⁠[7]

In April 2005 Basic Books published his FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop, which envisions home fabrication becoming as ubiquitous as the home computer and, drawing on years of fab lab projects worldwide, is organized around methods such as addition, subtraction and computation.⁠[8]

In February 2006 he gave the TED2006 talk “Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab,” describing the fab lab as a low-cost lab that lets people build what they need with digital and analog tools.⁠[9]

In 2009 the Fab Foundation, a US nonprofit that emerged from the fab lab program of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, was formed to support the growth of the international fab lab network, with a mission of enabling anyone to “make (almost) anything.”⁠[10]

In October 2012 he published the long essay How to Make Almost Anything in Foreign Affairs, arguing that digital fabrication is the next digital revolution after communication and computation, letting individuals design and produce physical objects on demand and challenging traditional models of business, foreign aid and education.⁠[11]

In 2013 he, Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel and Vint Cerf presented the idea of an Interspecies Internet in a TED talk; the organization held its first scientific workshop at MIT in 2019.⁠[12]

On November 14, 2017, Basic Books published Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution, written with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, which presents fabrication as the third digital revolution after computing and communication and discusses the inequality it could bring.⁠[13]

In October 2019 he, his student Benjamin Jenett and colleagues published work in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters on assembler robots that build large structures from tiny identical units called voxels; he calls them “relative robots,” which only need to know their position relative to the voxel they stand on.⁠[14]

In November 2022 he, doctoral student Amira Abdel-Rahman and others published work in Nature Communications Engineering showing swarms of robots built from the same voxels that carry power and data, able to decide when to build more robots and to cooperate on large assemblies; he said a fully autonomous self-replicating robot assembly system is still years away.⁠[15]

In April 2023 he gave the TEDxMIT Salon talk “Ready-Fire-Aim,” about success coming from failure, billed as “How to fail at (almost) anything.”⁠[16]

On May 28, 2023, he appeared on episode 380 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast as director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, discussing what Turing got wrong, digital logic, self-assembling and self-reproducing machines, digital fabrication, the risk of lab-made bioweapons, quantum computing and microfluidic bubble computation.⁠[17]

As of October 2026 he directs MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, chairs the Fab Foundation and leads the Fab Academy, with the fab lab network exceeding 3,000 labs in 160 countries; he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the AAAS and the American Physical Society, and a co-founder of the Interspecies Internet and the Science and Entertainment Exchange.⁠[18]

The Fab Academy is a fast-paced, hands-on program in which students learn rapid prototyping by planning and executing a new project each week; any fab lab with the infrastructure and trained instructors can offer it as a node.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://ng.cba.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

MIT Center for Bits and Atoms: Official website: https://cba.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Fab Foundation: Official website: https://fabfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Fab Academy: Official website: https://fabacademy.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]