Gershenfeld was born on September 1, 1959 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family.[3][4] His father, Walter Gershenfeld, was a law professor at Temple University who specialized in labor relations and arbitration,[5] and his mother Gladys Gershenfeld was also a lawyer and specialized in the same fields.[6][7]
In 1998, Gershenfeld started a class at MIT called "How to make (almost) anything". Gershenfeld wanted to introduce expensive, industrial-size machines to the technical students. However, this class attracted a lot of students from various backgrounds: artists, architects, designers, students without any technical background. In his interview to CNN, Gershenfeld said that "the students... were answering a question I didn't ask, which is: What is this stuff good for? And the answer is: Not to make what you can buy in stores, but to make what you can't buy in stores. It's to personalise fabrication".[10] Gershenfeld believes that this is the beginning of a new revolution: digital revolution in fabrication that will allow people to fabricate things, machines on demand.
Gershenfeld has presented his course on "How to make (almost) anything" at the Association of Professional Model Makers (APMM) 2010 Conference.[11]
This class later has led Gershenfeld to create Fab lab[12] in collaboration with Bakhtiar Mikhak at MIT. Gershenfeld feels very passionate about this project, as he believes that teaching kids how to use technology and create it themselves will empower the future generations to become more independent and create technology that each individual community needs, not a technology that is currently available on the market. Fab labs have spread around the world, having been established in the remotest of places and countries. In his interview with Discover magazine on the question what personal fabrication might be useful for, Gershenfeld said, "There is a surprising need for emergent technologies in many of the least developed places on the planet. While our needs might be fairly well met, there are billions of people on the planet whose needs are not. Their problems don't need incremental tweaks in current technology, but a revolution".[13]
As well as "How to make (almost) anything" class, Gershenfeld has started teaching the following classes: "How To Make Something That Makes (almost) Anything", "The Physics of Information Technology", "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling".[14]
Gershenfeld has been a keynote speaker at the Congress of Science and Technology Leaders (2015, 2016).
His work has been published in Science as well as in The American Physical Society journal. Amongst many is the research on Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching,[15] Microfluidic Bubble Logic research,[16] Physical one-way functions.[17] Gershenfeld is also known for releasing the Great Invention Kit in 2008, a construction set that users can manipulate to create various objects.[18]
In July 2019, close connections were revealed between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the MIT Media Lab.[25] The director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, was revealed to have accepted several large donations from Epstein and resigned in the ensuing scandal.[26] A report issued by Goodwin Procter at the request of the MIT Corporation determined that Gershenfeld had several meetings with Epstein and Ito.[27] During one such meeting in October 2013, Ito was present for only a brief time, and the bulk of the meeting took place solely between Epstein and Gershenfeld. Gershenfeld also admitted to having accepted multiple invitations to visit Epstein at his home in New York City.[27]
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