About Jose Gomez-Marquez

Jose Gomez-Marquez seeks to lower barriers to life sciences technology development by bridging the maker and health worlds together. His work includes the Ampli and MEDIKit platforms, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses around the world to invent their own medical technologies.

His other research projects include crowdsourced diagnostics, paper microfluidics, and reconfigurable systems for extreme environments that can detect pathogens and small molecules. At MIT, he founded the Little Devices Lab with project locations that include Chile, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Honduras, Spain, Germany and Colombia. His research has pioneered the use of unconventional materials and processes to generate medical technology in extreme environments.

These include unconventional tools such as toys, Lego’s, collaborative microbots, antique mechanisms and orbital experiments on the International Space Station. These and other technologies have been recognized by CNN, The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science’s Best of What’s New and on display at the Smithsonian.

Gomez-Marquez has served on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council for Advisors on Science & Technology. He was selected to Technology Review’s TR35, which also named him Humanitarian of Year and was named a TED Fellow. He cofounded MakerHealth a spin out that enables homegrown innovation within hospitals systems around the country using institutional Medical Makerspaces.

His recent work in affordable biotechnology automation and ultra low cost reactors is driven by a fundamental belief that everyone can have access to the tools to create life saving devices and materials. Starting in the Fall of 2025, the Little Devices Lab will be based at Emory University.