M. Curran Schieflbein

Our final honoree in the Innovative Solutions category is also a pandemic hero. As part of MIT's COVID-19 Response Team, Curran Schiefelbein has played a major role in Lincoln Laboratory's contact-tracing efforts. She was a member of the MCRS dashboard team, which supported COVID-19 detection and containment efforts on campus. And she was a key contributor for the website dashboard needed so that undergraduates could return to campus.

Curran mastered a highly complex system produced by Apple and Google for tracking exposure to the virus—one of only a handful of people in the world to understand how it works end to end. Her experimental data, analysis and perspective are routinely sought by federal officials, state public health authorities and technical experts. To quote one of her colleagues,

"Curran is an extremely talented engineer, and that combined with her desire to make tangible progress on solutions to societal challenges, makes her a driving force behind some of the most impactful work at Lincoln Laboratory and beyond."

Congratulations, Curran!