Dina Katabi

Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and director of the MIT Wireless Center. Born in Damascus, Syria, her early research addressed network congestion control, and she later pioneered techniques that use radio-frequency signals to measure human vital signs, including breathing, heart rate and sleep stages, without wearable sensors, extending the work to contactless monitoring for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2013, and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2017, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, and the National Academy of Medicine in 2025.