Brad grew up in small town Illinois, playing outside all summer, building go-karts and tree houses in the woods. He went to the University of Illinois to study engineering and Carnegie Mellon for robotics. Later, he shrunk his focus: he began building tiny robots the size of a grain of sand.

Now, Brad Nelson, PhD, is a Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich. He just published research in which he and his team navigated tiny robots  to a precise spot in a large animal, where the robot released a drug. The idea is to send these drug delivery vehicles to a blood clot or a tumor, precisely targeting disease without the harmful side effects that happen when drugs course through the entire body. He hopes his microrobots will be able to deliver payloads of medicine to people within the next three years.