| Biography
Bakhtiar Mikhak is a research scientist and the director of the Grassroots Invention group (GIG). He seeks to make the invention of sophisticated things easier for everyone. His research is guided by a simple principle: the most effective learning tools allow people to have "the pleasure of finding things out" through inventing things. To this end, Mikhak's research group has developed powerful, low-cost personal fabrication tools that can enable anyone to invent their own intricate physical and computational artifacts. These technologies have enjoyed great success in Mikhak's new development initiative, called the Learning Independence Network; this initiative aims to facilitate a "true transfer of technology," enabling people and organizations to design their own technological tools to address community challenges, thus fostering a greater sense of independence and self-sufficiency.
A summa cum laude graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in physics (1988), Mikhak earned his MS and PhD degrees in theoretical elementary particle physics at University of California, Los Angeles (1989 and 1995). He taught in the physics department at the University of California, Los Angeles for two and a half years before joining the Media Lab in 1997. At the Media lab, he was a research scientist in the Lifelong Kindergarten group before establishing his own research group in 2001.
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