Canan Dağdeviren (born May 4, 1985) is a Turkish academic, physicist, material scientist, and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she currently holds the LG Career Development Professorship in Media Arts and Sciences.

They create mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems that can intimately integrate with the target object of interest for sensing, actuation, and energy harvesting, among other applications.

[3] With this scholarship, she chose to conduct research in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where she focused on exploring patterning techniques and creating piezoelectric biomedical systems.

[10] When she was a PhD student, she promised herself that if she ever had the opportunity to build her own space, it would be physically transparent so that anyone passing by would have the ability to observe, take notes, and learn from her without needing any special permissions.

[12] Recently, Dagdeviren published an article featured in Advanced Intelligent Systems describing her group's experience with greater efficiency, as a result of the 5S Methodology principles.

"[14] This project seeks to develop conformal piezoelectric patches integrated into personal garments to extract energy from body movements such as the motion of arms, fingers, and legs.

[16] In 2018, Dagdeviren and her team developed an implantable, remotely controllable, miniaturized neural drug delivery system permitting dynamic adjustment of therapy with pinpoint spatial accuracy.

Given that many key neural circuitries have sub–cubic millimeter volumes and cell-specific characteristics, small-volume drug administration into affected brain areas with minimal diffusion and leakage is essential.

[17] In 2020, Dagdeviren and her team created a tailored, electronic textile conformable suit (E-TeCS) to perform large-scale, multi-modal physiological (temperature, heart rate, and respiration) sensing in vivo.

In healthy individuals and in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), it is shown that the piezoelectric thin films, coupled with algorithms for the real-time detection and classification of distinct skin-deformation signatures, enable the reliable decoding of facial movements.

The thin and conformable geometry of the cMaSK sensing system allows it to be applied to various types of face masks without concerns of deterioration in performance, as shown by mask-fit tests.

Ultrasound-induced transdermal drug delivery (sonophoresis) has long lingered in the by-lanes of academic and industrial research, and has failed to attain tangible commercial success.

While localized, needleless delivery of drugs is an exciting prospect, the bulky, power-consumptive equipment and long exposure times do not justify the highly-variable, operator-dependent outcomes in the permeability enhancement effects observed in vivo.

In 2023, Dagdeviren's team reported a conformable patch (cUSP) with embedded bulk piezoelectric elements to provide short-exposure (10 minutes) ultrasound and effect a 26.2-fold enhancement in niacinamide transport to the dermis.

[23] The final system is packaged in a compact form-factor on a flexible polymer substrate that can be applied on facial skin to aid hands-free penetration of popular cosmeceuticals.

Dagdeviren's latest invention, cUSP, has made the front cover page of Advanced Materials' June issue[25] and was also appeared in Rising Stars series.

Most recently, Dagdeviren has built up an impressive repertoire of projects in wearable ultrasound technologies, both for sensing and actuation published in Science Advances.

[28] With support from the NSF CAREER and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty awards that she received for this work, her goal is to make substantial scientific and leadership contributions to the emerging field of widely deployed biosensing tools, while achieving a broader understanding of soft tissue in a collective and systematic way for improved human health.

A nature-inspired honeycomb-shaped patch combined with a one-dimensional (1D) phased array transducer is guided by an easy-to-operate tracker that provides for large-area, deep tissue scanning and multi-angle breast imaging capability.

The device has the potential to introduce interfaces that enable next-generation features of wearable technologies, such as accurate, autonomous monitoring of soft tissue for 3D imaging, and machine-learning strategies to detect breast tumor progression at competitive costs outside of a clinical setting.

They then apply their minds, hearts, and hands to create unique micro- and nano-scale, mechanically adaptive electromechanical systems for human health monitoring—their scientific "honey.

"[34] The following year she received many honors, including being named a Gifted Citizen by Ciudad de las Ideas of Puebla, Mexico,[35] and the Spotlight Health Scholar by Aspen Institute.

[45] Dagdeviren noted that the combination of these two awards is significant, because they will allow her to "make substantial scientific and leadership contributions to the emerging field of widely deployed biosensing tools, and to achieve a broader understanding of soft tissue in a collective and systemic way for improved human health.

[56] She also finds great inspiration in Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet who practiced Sufism—a movement to understand the universe under the lenses of sensation, beauty and love as well as care about integrity, dignity and sincerity.