Early life & education
Jepsen earned undergraduate degrees from Brown University, receiving a Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering (with Honors) and an A.B. in Studio Art. [4] In 1989, she earned a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, where she conducted research in holographic imaging and displays systems, and co-created one of the first fully computed and digital holographic video systems, demonstrating dynamic three-dimensional holographic synthesis and reconstruction. [5] This system inspired a new subfield of holographic video and received numerous awards. [6]
Jepsen later earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in Optical Sciences where her graduate work focused applied optics, materials and imaging systems. She created large-area electronically tunable meta materials - liquid crystal filled sub-wavelength diffractive structures and a new theory of mathematically defining their design and performance [7] [8] She also demonstrated that it was technically feasible – but agreed it was culturally unacceptable – to project TV images on the Moon's surface. [9]
Career
Academic & research appointments
Prior to completing her doctorate, Jepsen held international academic and research appointments. She served as a computer science professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia, where she taught and conducted research in three-dimensional computer graphics. [10]
She was a Senior Fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in Germany, where she worked on display holography and experimental visual systems. She has created some of the largest ambient displays ever. In Cologne, she built a holographic replica of pre-existing buildings in the city's historic district and created a holographic display encompassing a city block. [11] [12]
Jepsen was also a San Diego Fellow at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she conducted research in early quantum and optical computing, using holographic techniques for computation and information processing. [13]
MicroDisplay Corp. & Intel
Jepsen co-founded MicroDisplay Corporation and served as its Chief Technology Officer, leading the development of the world’s first low-cost, single-panel microdisplay technology. Under her technical leadership, the company designed and built a manufacturing facility in Richmond, California, enabling volume production of compact, high-resolution microdisplay devices. [14] [15]
Jepsen later joined Intel, where she served as Chief Technology Officer of Intel’s Display Division, leading technology strategy and development across display and imaging systems spanning microdisplays, projection architectures, flat-panel displays, and semiconductor integration. [16]
Jepsen co-founded the nonprofit initiative One Laptop per Child and served as its chief architect and chief technology officer and its first employee. The organization had the goal of ttransforming education for children around the world by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.She led the design and system architecture of the $100 laptop, integrating display technology, power management, networking, and manufacturing into a deployable platform an order of magnitude cheaper than laptops of the day. [17] [18]
The OLPC laptop achieved the lowest power consumption of any laptop, outdoor usability including innovative sunlight readable screen invention, incorporated mesh networking, and supported alternative charging methods, enabling large-scale global deployment. OLPC generated over a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, reflecting the scale at which the system was manufactured and deployed, and influenced the emergence of low-cost, mobile computing platforms. Devices remain in use in multiple countries more than two decades later. [19] [20] [21]
Many of the architectural approaches pioneered at OLPC later appeared, in adapted form, across mainstream mobile computing platforms. [22] Google CEO Sundar Pichai credits the $100 laptop as the progenitor of Chromebooks. [23]
Pixel Qi & Google
Building on her work at OLPC and the Media Lab, Jepsen founded Pixel Qi, a display technology company focused on hybrid and transflective display systems for laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. She was also the company's CEO. [24] [25] Pixel Qi was later absorbed by Google. [26] [27]
At Google, Jepsen worked closely with the company’s founders, including Sergey Brin, and served in executive engineering roles. She founded, invented, and led multiple internal hardware initiatives spanning advanced display and imaging systems integrated with Android. Among these was “Lego TV,” a modular display system consisting of seamless, snap-together high-resolution screens designed to form scalable video walls. [28] [29]
Jepsen later joined Facebook (now Meta), where she served as Executive Director of Engineering at Facebook and Oculus. [30] She made foundational contributions to the development of the Oculus Quest 2, a standalone virtual-reality headset that has sold more than 20 million units worldwide. [31] She also led research and prototype development for next-generation AR and VR systems, including sunglass-form-factor devices featuring wide field of view, foveated rendering, and novel tileable projection architectures designed to project imagery onto the retina. [32] [33] [34]
Openwater
In 2016, Jepsen founded Openwater, a medical technology company developing noninvasive diagnostic, therapeutic and brain computer interface platforms that integrate focused ultrasound, infrared optics, and computational imaging. [35] [36] [37] The aspiration of the firm's work is to use the same technology set for many cancers, mental diseases and cardiovascular disease. Its progress in 2024 shrank initial, cart-sized units to a small wearable with a console, and lowering price 100-fold, and in 2025 moved to volume production in Taiwan. [38] [39] [40] The devices first went into human studies at Hartford Hospital in 2020, and were then refined for the next few years with a multi-center study at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. [41] [42] [43]
In addition, the company developed a low-intensity focused ultrasound platform that they tested at UCLA in pre-clinical work showing the ability to treat glioblastoma in both organoids and then mice using a resonant frequency yet diagnostic dose of ultrasound that melted away the glioblastoma tumors in mice. [44] [45] [46] [38]
In an open "Founder's Letter" in January 2024, [47] Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen announced having raised "$54 million in the past several months bringing the total to $100M raised" to create an AGPL licensed open source platform that can slash the cost of disease treatment.
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