Robert Freitas

Robert A. Freitas Jr. published the first detailed technical design study of a medical nanorobot ever published in a peer-reviewed mainstream biomedical journal and is the author of Nanomedicine, the first book-length technical discussion of the medical applications of nanotechnology and medical nanorobotics. Volume 1 was published in October 1999 by Landes Bioscience while Freitas was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) in Palo Alto, California. Freitas published Volume IIA in October 2003 while serving as a Research Scientist at Zyvex Corp., a nanotechnology company headquartered in Richardson, TX during 2000-2004. Freitas co-authored Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (2004), another first-of-its-kind technical treatise, and as of 2020 had 57 refereed journal publications or contributed book chapters, 20 patents in the fields of nanotechnology and medical nanorobotics, and several web-published books. Freitas won the 2006 Guardian Award from Lifeboat Foundation, the 2007 Foresight Prize in Communication, and the 2009 Feynman Prize in nanotechnology for theory, and now serves as a Senior Research Fellow at IMM.