Ronald Newbower, PhD

About Ronald Newbower

Ronald Newbower has devoted much of his career to biomedical research and technology development. He brings to that work his MIT undergraduate background in physics and electrical engineering and his Harvard PhD research experience. His published work in those early years was made possible by his design and development of unique ultra-sensitive instrumentation. Newbower’s subsequent academic faculty appointments, as he turned to tackle medical measurement challenges, have been within departments of Harvard Medical School, MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Early in his work at MGH he developed and led a bioengineering research group which developed novel physiologic instrumentation and systems, some of which was successfully commercialized and sold world-wide. In parallel with this, he and his collaborators conducted pioneering studies of the factors involved in morbidity and mortality due to human error during anesthesia care. The themes emerging from their work led to standards for critical-care monitoring and anesthesia delivery adopted in the 1980’s by all the relevant professional societies. The life-saving impact of that work is widely cited to this day. He ultimately served for 15 years as the Senior VP for Research and Technology for MGH from 1990 to 2005. In that position he oversaw the operation of their sponsored-research efforts, the largest and most diverse hospital-based research program in the country. His administrative team grew the hospital’s invention-licensing efforts dramatically, ultimately leading to major unrestricted-income streams for support of MGH’s research efforts.

Over the years he has developed or participated in various mechanisms for increasing MGH’s interactions with MIT’s work in health sciences and technology. He also was co-founder of CIMIT in 1998, a consortium of most of the major teaching hospitals and engineering schools in Boston. It focused on catalyzing interdisciplinary work, bringing MD’s and PhD’s closer together with seed funding. Over the years he has served as a Board member or consultant for several major medical-technology companies as well as non-profit research organizations. His career honors include the Arnold O. Beckman Award for Innovation from the Instrumentation Society of America, the AAMI Becton-Dickinson Career Achievement Award, and election as a Fellow in the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. Ron and Donna live in Acton, MA, and enjoy time with their two sons and five grandchildren.