The ETT Team

Yoav holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and has worked for 14 years in the high-tech industry specializing in software development and database security before moving to the US with his family. At this time he pursued his passion for education, completing his M.Ed. specializing in instructional design. 

Since 2018 Yoav has been managing the ETT program including its operations, budgeting, content, and building relationships with stakeholders (alumni, SMEs, housing providers, guest speakers, and sponsors).

Yoav has a great passion for education, technology, and developing people, and outside the workplace he enjoys practicing a healthy lifestyle including clean eating, researching different diets and eating patterns, and working out regularly.

As the ETT manager Yoav strives to transform the fellows into effective change agents in addition to creative educators of the future. To this end he constantly pushes the fellows beyond their comfort zone and helps them develop solid reflection capabilities. Yoav believes that proactiveness, curiosity, perseverance, and resourcefulness are the foundations for educating impactful  future generations of students.

Akintunde Ibitayo (Tayo) Akinwande is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Professor Akinwande received a B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Ife, Nigeria, a MS, and Ph.D.  in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. 

Professor Akinwande joined Honeywell Inc. in 1986 where he was responsible for the development of novel high-speed devices and circuits using GaAs heterostructure based technologies for very high speed and low power signal processing. As a Staff Scientist in Honeywell’s Si Microstructures group he conducted research on pressure sensors, accelerometers, thin-film field emission and led the Field Emitter Display technology development efforts.

He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in December 1994, where he conducts research on Micro & Nano Systems in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories of MIT and teaches courses on nano systems. His current research interests center on developing micro/nano devices that are based on charged particle beams such as vacuum nanoelectronics, sensors, actuators, intelligent flat panel displays, volumetric x-ray imaging for health care, manufacturing, and security.

From September 2009 to January 2013, he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) where he initiated and/or managed various research projects in the field of electron devices and MEMS to enable revolutionary performance and functionality for future defense systems.

Professor Akinwande is the Faculty Director the Empowering the Teachers (ETT) Program, which he leads. The program invites young, brilliant, and upcoming African academics, who recently completed their doctoral degree, to spend an intensive and inclusive semester at MIT in a bid to understudy the mode (& dynamics) of curricula development and content delivery at MIT.