Director, Fab Lab Outreach Program at the Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT

President & CEO, Fab Foundation


https:fab.cba.mit.edu

My How To Make (almost) Anything Page

The Fab Foundation

Background article from Evolution Technology Magazine

Sherry Lassiter is one of the architects of the MIT global initiative for field on-site technology development, the Fab Lab program. A Fab Lab, or as users like to call it, fabulous laboratory, is a rapid prototyping platform for technical education, innovation and personal expression. The Fab Lab network includes over 1800 digital fabrication facilities in more than 100 countries. Lassiter is President and CEO of the Fab Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to building technical capacity in a locality, improving individuals’ abilities to develop themselves and their communities and bringing access to tools and knowledge that cultivate and support innovating practices.

Lassiter works at the intellectual boundary where transfer of enabling, empowering, technical knowledge allows an idea to come into physical being--where bits become atoms. It’s an interdisciplinary landscape that requires a commitment to creating educational tools and exploring intellectual and economic frontiers. After a two-decade career in science journalism as producer, writer and director for television series such as Scientific American Frontiers, Discover the World of Science, and The Science Times, she became a protagonist in science and technology, becoming part of the story, rather than just telling the story. As Program Manager for the NSF-funded Center for Bits & Atoms at MIT she has seen and enabled the personal fabrication movement as it has grown and evolved. Today she serves as Director of the global Fab Lab Program at MIT as well as leading The Fab Foundation, the non-profit spinoff from MIT.

In her time at MIT, Lassiter has become a passionate maker and firm believer in the idea of personal fabrication and the empowerment that comes from making things for yourself. To make powerful, useful things in the world you have to learn deep content in science, mathematics and engineering. Her work with Fab Labs inspired her to go back to school to explore implementing digital fabrication in the classroom, not just to develop STEM skills, but to develop the integrated STEM knowledge young people need to invent and innovate. She earned a Master’s degree in Education at Harvard University, and continues the effort to develop more intuitive, integrated tools and resources for teaching the engineering and science content that future engineers, scientists, artists and crafters will need to thrive in a global economy. She spends most of her time managing the program for MIT, coordinating the international Fab Lab network for Fab Foundation, and as often as possible fabricating and mentoring youth in digital fabrication. Lassiter is currently engaged in the deployment and growth of Fab Labs around the world, enabling grassroots technology development by, for and of the community.

More to come soon...(under construction)

Contact Info:

Sherry J. Lassiter
Center for Bits & Atoms
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20 Ames Street, E15-401
Cambridge, MA 02142 USA
Sherry.Lassiter@cba.mit.edu
Tel +1 617 253 4651