Nan-Wei Gong

Dr. Nan-Wei Gong is a researcher, engineer and serial entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and CEO of figur8 Inc, and a research affiliate of the MIT Media Lab. Her first start-up, 3dim Tech Inc, received the grand prize of the MIT $100K entrepreneurship competition in 2013, selected in the Global Founders’ Skill Accelerator and was acquired in 2014. She founded Circular2 in 2014 – a technical consulting agency that specialized in on body sensing, low-power wearable electronics and digital textile research and development. Their clients include top universities – MIT, Harvard – and fortune 500 companies such as Google and Samsung. Her past work includes flexible and customizable printed sensing surfaces for gestural control, time-of-flight modules for 3D gesture tracking, and wearable sensing for dynamic management of ubiquitous media. She publishes her research extensively at top-tier computer science conferences and journals including best papers at CHI, UbiComp, UIST and IEEE pervasive magazine. She has worked in a number of industrial research labs, among them Microsoft Research and the Nokia Research Center, and was assigned as the R&D lead of Project Jacquard at Google ATAP in 2014-2016. She holds a PhD and MS degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a MS in Materials Science and Engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.