Mary Lou Jepsen

Mary Lou Jepsen is an American technologist and entrepreneur in the field of medical technology and computational imaging. She is the founder and Executive Chairman of Openwater.[1][2][3]

She has held research, and executive engineering roles at the MIT Media Lab, Google, Meta (Facebook), Intel. She was also the co-founder, chief technology officer and Chief Architect of the former nonprofit initiative One Laptop per Child.

Early life & education

Jepsen earned undergraduate degrees from Brown University, receiving a Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering (with Honors) and an A.B. in Studio Art.[4] In 1989, she earned a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, where she conducted research in holographic imaging and displays systems, and co-created one of the first fully computed and digital holographic video systems, demonstrating dynamic three-dimensional holographic synthesis and reconstruction.[5] This system inspired a new subfield of holographic video and received numerous awards.[6]

Jepsen later earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in Optical Sciences where her graduate work focused applied optics, materials and imaging systems. She created large-area electronically tunable meta materials - liquid crystal filled sub-wavelength diffractive structures and a new theory of mathematically defining their design and performance[7][8] She also demonstrated that it was technically feasible – but agreed it was culturally unacceptable – to project TV images on the Moon's surface.[9]

Career

Other works

From 2024 onward, Jepsen has remained an active public speaker on healthcare technology and applied science. In 2025 she appeared as a featured speaker at events such as WIRED Health, where she discussed open hardware and software approaches to medical imaging and therapy.[50]

She has also delivered public talks and interviews at institutions including The Commonwealth Club, presenting Openwater’s technical roadmap and the role of computational imaging in future clinical practice.[51]

Advocacy and views

In her public commentary and thought leadership, Jepsen has challenged conventional paradigms in medical innovation, healthcare access, and technology development.[1] Jepsen argues that traditional, proprietary medical-device development models are too slow, expensive, and risk-averse to address urgent global health challenges effectively.[9] Instead, she promotes open-source, collaborative approaches that leverage shared technology, data, and manufacturing practices to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and democratize access to advanced diagnostics and therapies.[52]

Jepsen asserts that the bottleneck in delivering breakthrough medical technologies is not primarily regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but rather the outdated innovation model itself.[53] She has called for the creation of open, modular platforms and shared safety and performance data repositories that would allow innovators to build on common foundations, reduce redundancy, and supply regulators with richer evidence to inform faster decisions. This approach, she believes, could compress device development timelines from over a decade to just a few years and cut development costs by orders of magnitude.[1]

Jepsen’s advocacy extends to open access to intellectual property and collaborative engineering. In public discussions and interviews, she has explained that open-sourcing patents, software, and hardware designs for medical devices under permissive frameworks like the Affero General Public License can expand participation in research and reduce development barriers.[54] Openwater, the company she leads, has publicly discussed embracing open innovation, aiming to share core technology while enabling diverse contributors to iterate and improve upon it.[2]

Beyond innovation models, Jepsen advocates for scalable, consumer-electronics manufacturing as a way to lower the unit costs of advanced medical devices.[3] She argues that applying established semiconductor production techniques to healthcare technology similar to those used in smartphones and other mass-market electronics can make high-performance diagnostic and therapeutic tools affordable and globally accessible.[55]

Jepsen also addresses inequalities in technology and healthcare participation, highlighting barriers faced by women in technology industries and advocating for broader inclusion and representation.[56] In a public statement she noted that many senior women leave technology sectors due to isolation and systemic bias, underscoring her belief in the importance of diversity and equity in innovation ecosystems.[57]

Additionally, Jepsen has publicly shared personal reflections on healthcare systems, including the challenges of accessing quality health insurance and the impact of system design on patient outcomes.[56]

Board Service

• Chairman of the Board of Openwater.health since 2016
• Board director Lear Corporation since 2016. Largest US-based automotive suppler.[58]
• Board director UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society since inception.[59]
• Member of Council of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.[60]
• Previous she has served on many boards and task forces. She also has broad foreign and domestic advisory experience in Peru, China, Uruguay, Taiwan, Brazil and the United States.[61]

Awards and recognitions

She has also received numerous awards for the work she did at One Laptop per Child and has been named to many other "top" lists in computing by Fast Company, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum and others.

• 100 Most Influential People in the World (Time magazine's "Time 100").[62]
• Technology Pioneer 2019 (World Economic Forum)[63]
• 2018 Forbes America's Top 50 Women In Tech[64]
• 2018 Forbes 50 over 50[65]
• One of 2013's top 10 thinkers (as named by CNN),[66] for her work in rethinking functional brain imaging with compact systems that could lead to direct communication via human thought.
• One of the top 50 female computer scientists of all time (as determined by the Anita Borg Institute).[67]
• In 2014 she received an honorary Doctorate of Science from Brown University.[68]
• Edwin H. Land Medal from the Optical Society (OSA).[69]
• Canada's Athabasca University awarded Jepsen an honorary doctorate in 2008.[70]
• Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA).[71]
• Brown University's top alumni awards: Horace Mann Medal (awarded by Brown Graduate School) and BEAM award (awarded by Brown University School of Engineering).[72][73]
• 2011 Award for Innovation[74] from the Anita Borg Institute.[75]
• 2010 World Technology Award: for individual contributions to hardware[76]
• 2010 Display of the year award - Society for Information Display (SID)[77]
• 2010 IEEE ACE Award Grand Prize for best emerging technology (awarded to Pixel Qi)[78]
• 2008 Design of the year award - London Design Museum[79]
• 2007 INDEX Design Award - €100,000 for OLPC $100 laptop[80]

Personal life

Jepsen is married to John Patrick Conor Ryan, formerly a partner at Monitor Group. In 1995, she suffered from a pituitary gland tumor and had it removed and thus suffers from panhypopituitarism, requiring a twice-daily regimen of hormone replacement;[81] her personal description of this and the ongoing challenges she faces was published in the New York Times.[82]

External links

• Mary Lou Jepsen on Google Scholar
• Oculus Has Hired Mary Lou Jepsen Away From Google X