Mehmet Toner

Who is Mehmet Toner?

Mehmet Toner, PhD is a Turkish biomedical engineer. A professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School and professor of biomedical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Toner first gained prominence for his theory of intra-cellular ice formation while finishing his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then Prof. Toner has made contributions to the specific fields of cryobiology and biopreservation and to the wider field of biomedical engineering in the form of inventions, books, and journal publications.

Toner was born in Istanbul, Turkey in July, 1958. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Istanbul Technical University in 1983, and his master’s degree and doctorate in Mechanical Engineering and Medical Engineering at MIT in 1989. Toner worked on his doctorate under Prof. Ernest Cravalho who was one the first engineering scientists to work on cryobiology and is still a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Dr. Toner's early work focused on understanding cellular injuries during cryopreservation and finding optimum strategies for cell preservation. His later works include microfluidics, Bio-sensing and dry preservation of mammalian cells.