Fireside Chat with Dr. Hugh Herr

Join us for a conversation with the Pioneer of the Bionic Age

HUGH HERR
Professor, MIT Media Lab
Co-Director, K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics

Hugh Herr is one of the most remarkable scientists and inventors alive. A professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he heads the Biomechatronics group and co-directs the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, he effectively founded the modern field of bionics. A champion rock climber as a teenager, he lost both legs below the knee after a mountaineering accident at seventeen, then set out to engineer the very limbs that would let him climb and walk again. Today his lab builds technologies that merge body and machine, powered prosthetic limbs, exoskeletons, and the neural interfaces that let a person’s mind control a bionic limb directly. His breakthroughs include the world’s first powered bionic ankle, a device that actively propels the body and has restored natural movement to thousands of people, and TIME has named him a leader of the bionic age.

In this fireside chat, Hugh Herr will share what a life at the frontier of the human body has taught him: how personal loss became a lifelong mission, how to turn radical ideas into technology that reaches real people, and why he believes disability itself can be engineered out of existence. Whether you are drawn to medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship, or simply the biggest questions about what it means to be human, this is a rare chance to learn from the man rebuilding what the body can do.