About the MIT Sports Summit

This is the flagship event of MIT’s Sports Lab. It brings together a curated group of doers - those in industry and academia who have big visions and are on the forefront of their disciplines.  It is an opportunity for all of our affiliates, supporters, and members of the MIT community to come to campus and share advances, challenges and passions that lie at the intersection of engineering and sports. 

About the MIT Sports Lab

The MIT Sports Lab, formerly known as STG – MIT Sports Technology  Group – is dedicated to building an interconnected community of faculty, students, industry partners, alums, and athletes who are passionate about tackling challenges that lie at the intersection of engineering and sports. The program links the expertise of MIT faculty; the unique resources of MIT’s facilities; the passion of MIT students; and the needs, experience and insight of industry partners.

Leadership

Christina Chase

Lecturer, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Co-founder & Managing Director of the MIT Sports Lab

Christina Chase is a Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and serves as its Managing Director. The MIT Sports Lab is a sports engineering program that seeks to improve athletic performance and advance the state of the art in research, equipment and actionable insights to help support athletes in their goals to push the limits of human performance through collaborations between industry leaders, students, faculty, alumni, and startups.
 
Prior to this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Christina has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community and in 2014, Mashable named her one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene.
 
In MIT’s School of Engineering, Christina leads the one of the largest undergraduate entrepreneurship classes, Entrepreneurship in Engineering. She helped start and co-direct, StartMIT (formerly Start6), an entrepreneurship bootcamp, with Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. She has served as the Academic Advisor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s 2A Entrepreneurship Track and as an advisor for the Design of Medical Devices and Precision Machine Design classes and has lectured on innovation in the Department of Material Science in their senior capstone design class Materials Projects Laboratory, where students create the next generation of groundbreaking materials, as well as mentored for the MADMEC Material Science Design Competition. She has also taught Applications in Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques, where advanced MIT startup teams are helped to accelerate growth over the semester.
 
Christina is an entrepreneur with a track record of success in a several industries, starting her first company when she was 18 years old. Most recently she was the CEO and co-founder of Firehoze, an education technology company that focused on online education that involved over a hundred instructors from the most prestigious universities. She has worked with numerous founding teams across industries, including B2B hardware, healthcare IT, materials and coatings, and consumer electronics, and has also led innovation in established companies, such as the photonics company, Labsphere, where as the Director of the Materials and Coating division, in under a year she tripled revenue and led the group to file three key patents for new materials.
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Christina is a Techstars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, is a judge for the SXSW Accelerator Competition and former Advisory Board member. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community.

In a past life, Christina was a cyclist where she was one of 12 women selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding. 

Professor Anette (Peko) Hosoi

Associate Dean of the MIT School of Engineering; Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Co-founder & Faculty Director, MIT Sports Lab

​Anette “Peko” Hosoi is the associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics. In 2015, she co-foundered the MIT Sports Lab with Christina Chase and serves as its faculty director. The MIT Sports Lab is a sports engineering program that seeks to improve athletic performance and advance the state of the art in research, equipment and actionable insights to help support athletes in their goals to push the limits of human performance through collaborations between industry leaders, students, faculty, alumni, and startups.
 
Prof. Hosoi’s research contributions lie at the juncture of nonlinear hydrodynamics, microfluidics and bio-inspired design. She is a world leader in the study of the hydrodynamics of thin fluid films and in the nonlinear physical interaction of viscous fluids and deformable interfaces.  A common theme in her work is the fundamental study of shape, kinematic and rheological optimization of biological fluid systems for locomotion and their application to the emergent field of “soft robotics”.  A unique mixture of experimental work, numerical simulation and theoretical analysis characterizes her work, and it combines elements of both engineering design and mathematical optimization.  Her work is widely known and internationally respected by physicists, biologists, roboticists and applied mathematicians, as well as engineers, and is used to guide the engineering design of robotic swimmers, crawlers, burrowers and other mechanisms. 
 
Professor Hosoi has served as a member of the Defense Science Study Group and in 2012, was named a fellow of the American Physical Society for “innovative work in thin fluid films and in the study of nonlinear interactions between viscous fluids and deformable interfaces including shape, kinematic, and rheological optimization in biological systems.”
 
She is also an exceptional and innovative teacher, an inspiring mentor and an outstanding communicator of science in general. She is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the past winner of the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, the MIT School of Engineering Junior Bose Award for Education, the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, and awarded the prestigious Den Hartog Distinguished Educator Award.
 
​When she is not in lab, she can be found at Highland Mountain Bike Park on her downhill rig, snowboarding in British Columbia or monitoring her Fantasy Football team.

Student Leadership

Frank Rinaldi

Frank Rinaldi is a second year MBA student at MIT Sloan concentrating in Business Analytics. He is one of the student Co-Leads for the MIT Sports Summit, and Co-President of the MIT Sloan Sports, Media and Entertainment Club. He interned at MLB Advanced Media this past summer on their Digital Strategy team. Prior to Sloan, Frank worked for five years in the healthcare technology space.


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Sam Feder

Sam Feder is a 2019 MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to Sloan, he worked at McKinsey & Company in their sports practice. Originally from Montreal, Canada, Sam holds a bachelor of chemical engineering from McGill University.

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Sarah Fay

Sarah is currently a graduate student working with Peko Hosoi. Her current project is about the modeling the biomechanics of running, and in the past, she's worked on optimizing racket weight distribution for power hitting. She played field hockey and squash at MIT as an undergraduate and is now an assistant coach of the MIT field hockey team. 
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Cam Douglas

Cam is a first year Master's student at CU Boulder, and a recent graduate from MIT with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. A former lightweight rower and captain, Cam brings passion and dedication to all his work and research. With more athletic flexibility in graduate school, he looks forward to getting back the games he loves like hockey, skiing, and a variety of esports. Cam prides himself on developing a diverse skill set and has worked on projects ranging from product design for rowing and footwear, to the statistical analysis of luck and skill in League of Legends. 

Jennifer Beem

Jennifer Beem is currently a graduate student at MIT. Before MIT she worked at Chevron Phillips in a number of polymer material/application development roles, and has a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma. She is an enthusiast of all things outdoors, including cycling, running, and climbing. In her spare time, she is studying to become a personal trainer. Her current research interest involves developing textile and material design for sports applications.

Shea Landeene
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Shea is an undergraduate Biological Engineer in the MIT class of 2020. She is an active member on campus as the President of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, member of 2018 MIT Fall Career Fair Committee, and starting middle blocker for the MIT Varsity Volleyball team, among other extracurriculars. Shea prides herself on a diverse skill-set, having worked on projects ranging from mechanical engineering for Adidas, to published research conducted in Australia with the novel application of nanoparticles to cardiovascular disease, to defining new business tactics within the Space Industry in Spain. Shea hopes to progress forward at the intersection of her innovative mindset and passion for sports.    

Charlotte Folinus

Charlotte is a junior studying Mechanical Engineering at MIT. She is passionate about product development, particularly the convergence of mechanical design and the human body. She previously worked with Wahoo Fitness on their bicycle trainers and future products as well as with MIT startup W8X on their robotic weight lifting device. She also researched flat light for Shred and human motion perception for MIT’s Newman Lab.

Jack Snowdon

Jack is an undergraduate student at MIT studying Computer Science and Economics. He plays on the soccer team, and carries his sporting passion into the field of data science, where he is currently working on an analytics project for FC Barcelona. In past summers, Jack published a research paper on a spatiotemporal traffic volume prediction model as well as conducted research in Northrop Grumman’s data science and cognitive autonomy group.

Tyler Ashoff

Tyler is currently a graduate student at Duke pursuing a MS is data
science. Prior to Duke he earned his bachelors in mechanical
engineering at MIT. His interests include the intersection of mechanical
analysis and data science, and almost all games.

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