Two Romanian women named among MIT’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35

Romanian women Mariana Popescu and Raluca Ada Popa have been nominated in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ” World top 35 innovators under the age of 35“. MIT creates a list like this every year to celebrate accomplishments that have a dramatic impact on the world.

The top includes researchers and innovators and generally focus on the fields of biomedicine, computing, communications, business and web.

But who are the two nominees?

Mariana Popescu is an architect who has managed to develop a system which is capable to transform knitted textiles into concrete buildings. This process saves money, carbon and time. Her efficient way of building complex structures have a minimal ecological footprint and they are low in cost. Thanks to her innovation, people will be able to build low cost and sturdy constructions in areas that were affected by natural disasters or war.

Mariana started her PhD in 2015 at the Block Research Group at the Technology in Architecture Institute at the ETH University in Zurich. She has graduated this year and the evaluation committee recommended her for the ETH medal for extraordinary thesis. The title of her thesis is „KnitCrete: Stay-in-place knitted fabric formwork for complex concrete structures”.

Raluca Ada Popa has created a special encrypting system that works with several applications and offers them a high level of protection. Her invention is very useful as it has been demonstrated that even though hackers manage to break in, they are not able to decipher data. Her invention is now used by hospitals to share patient records without affect patient confidentiality. As well, another system she invented called Opaque, which secures hardware systems against compromised software is now used by IBM.