Mary Lou Jepsen is an American technologist and entrepreneur whose work spans noninvasive medical technologies & devices, computational imaging, and large-scale visual and interactive systems over multiple decades. She is currently founder and Executive Chairman of Openwater,[1] a medical technology company developing low-cost, semiconductor-based devices that integrate focused ultrasound, infrared optics, and computation for noninvasive diagnostics and therapeutics. Openwater’s devices[2] are currently used in clinical research programs across oncology, neurological and psychiatric disorders, cardiovascular disease, brain–computer interface research, and veterinary medicine.
Jepsen is known for her pioneering work in the design and commercialization of display, projection and imaging systems. Her contributions include laptops, projection displays, televisions, screens, touch-enabled systems, holographic and light-field displays, and other immersive visual technologies.[3] Across these domains, she has translated advances in optics, materials, and semiconductor engineering into systems manufacturable at consumer scale.
She has held faculty, research, and executive engineering roles at the MIT Media Lab, Google, Meta (Facebook), Intel, and as a co-founder, chief technology officer and Chief Architect of One Laptop per Child, influencing both mass-market consumer devices and experimental systems at the limits of visual computation.
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] She earned a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab in 1989 as 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]
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 Kunsthochschule Köln (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, Germany 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]
MIT Media Lab & One Laptop per Child
Following her leadership roles in startup and industrial display technology development, Jepsen accepted a tenure-track professor role at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded the Nomadic Displays research group.[17][18][19] The group explored portable and large-scale display, projection, and interactive systems designed to operate outside traditional fixed infrastructures, addressing challenges spanning power, form factor, environmental lighting, and human–display interaction.
Jepsen simultaneously co-founded One Laptop per Child and served as its chief architect and chief technology officer and its first employee. 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.[20][21]
The OLPC laptop achieved the lowest power consumption of any laptop, rugged 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.[22][23][24]
Many of the architectural approaches pioneered at OLPC later appeared, in adapted form, across mainstream mobile computing platforms.[25] Google CEO Sundar Pichai credits the $100 laptop as the progenitor of Chromebooks.[26]
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 and was its CEO.[27][28] Pixel Qi was later absorbed by Google in an acqui-hire that brought the company’s team and technology into Google.[29][30]
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.[31][32]
Meta (Facebook) & Oculus
Jepsen later joined Facebook (now Meta), where she served as Executive Director of Engineering at Facebook and Oculus.[33] 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.[34] 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.[35]
Experimental & large scale visual systems
Alongside commercial development, Jepsen has pursued experimental projects exploring perception, communication, and scale in visual systems, including Moon-TV and research into city-block-scale holographic and light-field displays.[36][37]
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.
The company’s technology enables selective, cell-level interactions within biological tissue without surgical intervention, combining phase-controlled ultrasound with optical sensing and computation. Devices are entering clinical research programs across cancer, neurological and psychiatric disorders, neuro-degenerative diseases, covid/long covid, cardiovascular disease, brain–computer interface research, and veterinary medicine.[38][39][40] 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. [41]
In a 2020 online call, Dr. Jepsen stated that Openwater devices were in the prototyping phase with alpha kits then expected August 2020. The Openwater website stated in 2020: "We are starting hospital studies on humans for use as a stroke detector at the end of 2020."[42][43] 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 University of Pennsylvania.[44][45][46]
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.[47]
In parallel, Openwater developed and then performed clinical trials at University of Arizona using a set of therapeutic units it developed. Using these units nearly half of the participants in the trial went into remission of severe depression. These devices were tuned via software to different harmonic frequencies of low-intensity focused ultrasound that had the effect of quelling the over-firing neurons.[48][49]
As of 2020, the devices were slated to come out sometime in 2021, which they did for clinical trials and human testing at a variety of medical institutes as cited above, but the new and improved low-cost wearable systems were first made for the end of 2024 and scheduled for volume production in 2025.[41]
In an open "Founder's Letter" in January 2024,[51] 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.
Board Service
Chairman of the Board of Openwater.health since 2016
Board director Lear Corporation since 2016. Largest US-based automotive suppler.[52]
Previous she has served on many boards and task forces. She also has broad foreign and domestic advisory experience in Peru, China, Uruguay, Taiwan, Brazil and the United States.[55]
Awards and recognitions
100 Most Influential People in the World (Time magazine's "Time 100").[56]
One of 2013's top 10 thinkers (as named by CNN),[60] for her work in rethinking functional brain imaging with compact systems that could lead to direct communication via human thought.
One of the top 50 female computer scientists of all time (as determined by the Anita Borg Institute).[61]
In 2014 she received an honorary Doctorate of Science from Brown University.[62]
2010 World Technology Award: for individual contributions to hardware[70]
2010 Display of the year award - Society for Information Display (SID)[71]
2010 IEEE ACE Award Grand Prize for best emerging technology (awarded to Pixel Qi)[72]
2008 Design of the year award - London Design Museum[73]
2007 INDEX Design Award - €100,000 for OLPC $100 laptop[74]
She has also received numerous awards for the work she did at One Laptop per Child and has been named to many other "top" lists in computing by Fast Company, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum and others.
Personal life
Jepsen is married to John Patrick Conor Ryan, formerly a partner at Monitor Group. In 1995, she suffered from a pituitary gland tumor and had it removed and thus suffers from panhypopituitarism, requiring a twice-daily regimen of hormone replacement;[75] her personal description of this and the ongoing challenges she faces was published in the New York Times.[76]
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