Mehmet Toner

Mehmet Toner
Born	July 1958 (age 66) Istanbul, Turkey
Nationality	Turkish
Alma mater	MIT ITU
Awards	ASME YC Fung Faculty Award in Bioengineering, 1994; Whitaker Foundation Special Opportunity Award, 1995; Taplin Faculty Fellow Award given by Harvard and MIT, 1997; Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering
Scientific career
Fields	Cryobiology, Biomedical Engineering
Institutions	Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Ernest G. Cravalho
Notable students	Albert Folch, Sangeeta Bhatia

Mehmet Toner (born July 1958) is a Turkish biomedical engineer. A professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School and professor of biomedical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), Toner first gained prominence for his theory of intra-cellular ice formation while finishing his PhD in Medical Engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). Toner has made contributions to the specific fields of cryobiology and biopreservation and to the wider field of biomedical engineering in the form of inventions, books, and journal publications.

Early life and education

Toner was born in Istanbul, Turkey in July, 1958. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Istanbul Technical University in 1983, and his master's degree and doctorate in Mechanical Engineering and Medical Engineering at MIT in 1989. Toner worked on his doctorate under Ernest Cravalho, and completed postdoctoral work under Martin Yarmush and Ronald Tompkins at MGH.

Career

Toner's early work focused on understanding cellular injuries during cryopreservation and finding optimum strategies for cell preservation. As part of that work he proposed acetylated trehalose as a novel cryoprotectant. His later works include microfluidics, Bio-sensing and dry preservation of mammalian cells.

Toner serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine(CEM) located at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Children, as well as the Director of the CEM-affiliated BioMEMS Resource Center. He was a member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in 2016, and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2017.