Hayat Sindi dreams bigger than most. After getting her PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge, the Saudi doctor was a visiting scholar at Harvard, where she founded Diagnostics For All, a nonprofit dedicated to providing low-cost diagnostics for people in the developing world living far from hospitals – which makes up about 60 percent of the developing world.
But one of her biggest contributions to medicine is a creation of her own. Her company Synoptix developed a diagnostic tool can help detect breast cancer earlier than others. Another of her innovations is the Magnetic Acoustic Resonance Sensor.
She is also one of the first women to join the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia, and worked on a scientific advisory board for the UN. Don’t think she went unnoticed – the Saudi genius was among Newsweek’s 150 Women Who Shake The World, a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, and won Arabian Business’s Award for Medicine.
Having made such contributions to science, she has shifted her gaze to the future. Her i2 Institute for imagination and ingenuity focuses on empowering young minds in the Middle East. The institute hosts a fellowship program for inventors and entrepreneurs, so that the next generation can have the same (if not better) opportunities than she did.
“We envision a world in which the only barrier to an innovator's success is the quality of his or her ideas,” the i2 website reads. “We want to give every scientist, technologist and engineer the opportunity to discover and fulfill their potential”
But she hasn’t given up her entrepreneurial and creative spirit, she has also been working on a portable MRI scanner to be used in developing parts of the world. You should probably keep an eye out for her, something tells us she’ll be back in the news soon enough.
