The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee and is part of the Exploring Design Practice undergraduate course. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

Our cities are becoming increasingly intelligent. As technology permeates our built environment, what new opportunities are afforded? Join Newsha Ghaeli, Cofounder and CEO of Biobot Analytics, as she discusses her experience moving from architecture, to the MIT Senseable City Lab, and most recently to Biobot Analytics—and how she integrates design, engineering, and entrepreneurship to develop new ways to address our most pressing urban challenges.

Newsha Ghaeli is Cofounder and CEO of Biobot Analytics, a startup measuring human health information in sewage. Biobot is focusing on providing cities with data on the opioid epidemic: the biggest public health crisis in the United States. Biobot evaluates opioid consumption by measuring its concentrations in sewage, and then uses this information to evaluate public health programming and inform resource allocation.
 
Prior to Biobot, Newsha was a Research Fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab investigating the future of cities through the transformative power of technology. Biobot Analytics is a spin-off of some of this work, and a larger collaboration across MIT.

An architect by training, Newsha has collaborated on work with the United Nations Climate Change Summit, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the World Economic Forum's Council on the Future of Cities. Currently, Newsha is the curator of the WEF Global Shapers Boston Hub: a group of individuals under the age of 30 dedicated to promoting social change in their communities.