Instructors
Charlie Sodini
LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Faculty Director, Hong Kong Innovation Node Charlie’s research interests are focused on medical electronic systems for monitoring and imaging. These systems require state-of-the-art mixed signal integrated circuit and systems with extremely low energy dissipation. He is the co-founder of the Medical Electronic Device Realization Center that is revolutionizing medical diagnostics and treatments by bringing health care directly to the individual and creating enabling technology for future information-driven healthcare systems. Charlie has acted as a consultant for many top technology companies in the U.S. In 1999 he co-founded SMaL Camera Technologies, which develops digital imaging solutions for a variety of business and consumer markets, including ultra-slim digital still cameras and automotive vision systems. SMaL’s Ultra-Pocket digital camera was selected the best new product at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show and is in the Guiness Book of Records as the World’s Thinnest Camera. Throughout his career at MIT, Charlie has published extensively, winning best paper awards from International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in addition to the Darlington Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He and Roger Howe co-authored the widely used textbook Microelectronics: An Integrated Approach. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1995 for contributions to the development of over-sampled A/D converters, DRAM devices and circuits, and integrated circuits process technology. Charlie has been very visible in professional leadership roles, serving as President of the IEEE Solid-State Circuit Society, as well as General Chair of the IEEE VLSI Circuits Symposium and the International Electron Devices Meeting. Charlie started his career at Hewlett Packard where developed state-of-the-art silicon integrated circuit image sensors and memories. He is a graduate of Purdue University and holds Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Marina Chan
Director of Education, MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node Director & Instructor, MEFTI Marina Chan began her career in banking at Merrill Lynch for the Asian equity business before earning her master’s degree in education from Harvard University. She has worked with students from K-16 and young professionals across Asia and the US through her experiences in teaching, advising student startups, and leading professional development workshops. With a grant awarded by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund, Marina founded Alpha Commons in 2015, an educational program cultivating creativity in children through engagement with technology. She is a board member of the Hong Kong Red Cross Hospital Schools and is a CFA Charterholder.
George Whitfield
Co-founder & CEO, HodlPal
Instructor & Lecturer
George is a serial entrepreneur with three degrees from MIT: a BS in Computer Science ’03 and an MEng ’04 and PhD ’12 in Materials Science and Engineering. He is passionate about building software that improves people’s lives, and his career has spanned computational aspects of FinTech, robotics, transportation, renewable energy, and environmental protection. George is also the co-founder and CEO of HodlPal, a startup building a trust-driven social network that aims to help people control their attention and access crowd-sourced wisdom, starting with the cryptocurrency community. Prior to HodlPal, George was the Director of Simulation at Nucleus Scientific, where he joined as an early employee and helped grow the company by 10x in size over the course of just seven years. While in the PhD program at MIT, George co-founded and was CEO of SunPoint, a solar tracking company that won the 2008 MIT Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition and the 2009 Renewables Track of the MIT Clean Energy Prize. Prior to SunPoint George also co-founded Socially Conscious Software to develop mobile apps in the early days of the iPhone App Store. Lastly, George is the co-inventor on four patents involving novel actuator technologies.
Teaching Fellows
Adam Au
Adam is a lawyer and investment professional with expertise in M&A, venture capital, Fintech and Legaltech. He started his career at top-tier international law firms (Linklaters and Cleary Gottlieb) and had extensive experience working as an in-house counsel at private equity fund (Hillhouse Capital) and investment bank (Bank of America Merrill Lynch). Adam also consults for a fintech start-up in Asia that aims to digitize the landscape of future mergers and acquisitions transactions. Prior to his studies at MIT, Adam was the head of legal of a global Sino-American private equity fund backed by China Great Wall AMC (one of the four state-owned asset management enterprises) and WL Ross & Co. (private equity arm of Invesco) where he was responsible for advising on private equity transactions in areas such as advanced technology, healthcare and renewable energy, as well as other new business and compliance initiatives. Being a multilingual globetrotter, Adam has diversified practice and interests ranging from general corporate, TMT, Fintech, data privacy, venture capital, private equity, and e-commerce. An avid reader and writer, Adam recently published a research paper on data privacy implication of contact tracing in the era of COVID-19 in the MIT Computation Law Report. Adam is a graduate of Brown University (Economics and East Asian Studies), University of Oxford (Law) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MBA). He is qualified to practice law in Hong Kong.
Kenny Li
Kenny is the VP of Strategy at Secure AI Labs, a healthcare technology startup located in Cambridge, MA. He received his MBA from MIT Sloan in 2020. Prior to his MBA, he built and ran an IT transformation company as CEO, specializing in cloud strategy and migration for global enterprises. In his free time, Kenny enjoys building fun side projects both on the hardware and software side.
Sharon Lin
Sharon Lin is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pursuing a bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciecne. She is passionate about working on solutions to societal problems and is interested in social justice, civic participation, and financial empowerment. She is currently a venture partner at Contrary Capital, where she works on sourcing and investing up to $500,000 in early-stage student-led-startups across a variety of industries. She previously worked as a software engineer intern at Microsoft, Cisco Meraki, Return to Corp (a startup based in San Francisco), and Tulip Interfaces and has experience with building software products.
Oriana Yeung
University of Hong Kong, Postgraduate Certificate in Laws Oriana is a Law Graduate from the University of Hong Kong, after completing her Bachelor Degree in Social Sciences and Laws. She is going to start off her career in Allen & Overy as a trainee solicitor where she will be exposed to International Capital Markets, Corporate, Banking, Litigation and general Corporates Practices. Oriana is particularly interested in the global financial regulations and its effects on financial technology.
Macingo Wan
Associate Consultant, IBM Before joining IBM as an Associate Consultant, Macingo /ˈməkɪŋɡəʊ/ graduated from The HK Polytechnic University with the major of Information Technology. He has experiences in the blockchain and banking industries and now is leveraging his knowledge to provide technical solutions to daily business problems. In fact, he’s generally interested for exploring the topics that he has never encountered before. At night, he would take virtual adventures into historical spirituality with a glass of spirit at hand.