Canan Mercan MSc, PhD

Dr. Canan Dagdeviren Mercan, MSc, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, where she leads the Conformable Decoders, a research group. The group aims to convert the patterns of nature and the human body into beneficial signals and energy. Dagdeviren earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on exploring patterning techniques and creating piezoelectric biomedical systems. Her collective PhD research involved flexible mechanical energy harvesters, multi-functional cardiac vessel stents, wearable blood pressure sensors, and stretchable skin modulus sensing bio-patches.

As a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, she conducted her postdoctoral research at the MIT David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, working on designing and fabricating multi-functional, minimally invasive brain probes that can simultaneously deliver drugs on demand and electrically modulate neural activity precisely and selectively for the treatment of neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

At the Media Lab, Dagdeviren’s Conformable Decoders group is working to create mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems that can intimately integrate with the target object for sensing, actuation, and energy harvesting, among other applications. Her research is built on the belief that vital information from nature and the human body is ‘coded’ in various forms of physical patterns, and those conformable decoders can ‘decode’ these patterns into beneficial signals and/or energy.