Elizabeth Wayne

I was raised in Mississippi. My father is a paraplegic Baptist minister and my mother is a schoolteacher. I told everyone around me I wanted to be a physicist at age 11 after completing a science fair project on nuclear fusion. I wanted to be the first to achieve sustainable fusion reactors as energy sources on Earth (yes at age 11). I achieved my childhood goal and earned a Bachelors in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania but I fell in love with optical imaging rather than nuclear fusion. And eventually cancer too. I got a PhD in Biomedical Engineering building live animal imaging platforms to visualize cancer as it spreads through the body. So I study ways to use immune cells to deliver therapeutic genes and proteins to the places our body needs them the most: in disease. 2017 TED Fellow