Dr. Mehmet Toner is a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), associate director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine (CEM) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Children, and director of the CEM-affiliated BioMEMS Resource Center. He holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Istanbul Technical University and graduate degrees in mechanical and medical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Toner worked on his doctorate under the guidance of MIT professor Ernest Cravalho, one of the first engineering scientists to work on cryobiology.
Dr. Toner first gained prominence for his theory of intra-cellular ice formation, while still in graduate school. Since then, he 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. Dr. Toner’s early work focused on understanding cellular injuries during cryopreservation and finding optimum strategies for cell preservation. His later works include microfluidics, Bio-sensing, and dry preservation of mammalian cells. Dr. Toner’s laboratories have produced several researchers, and he continues to train post-doctoral fellows and graduate students from MIT and Harvard University.