Emmanuel Dumont, PhD
Founder and CEO of Shade
Faculty member at the Center for Discovery and Innovation
I am the founder and CEO of Shade, a semiconductor startup that commercializes a novel UV sensor that mimics the skin sensitivity. Our technology is currently being used by both top-tier academic hospitals and large publicly-traded companies. I am also a faculty member at the Center for Discovery and Innovation where I develop new statistical methods to analyze epigenetic-genetic interactions.
Previously, I was a postdoctoral scientist at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in NYC, working on the early development of Shade. Before that, I got my PhD in biophysics at Columbia University working on molecular tribology. My PhD work was published in Nature Nanotechnology and I was awarded the Liu-Ping fellowship for ranking first at the department's qualifying examinations.
Finally, the picture above represents the "Conflict" sculpture which I designed for the Venice Biennale of architecture in 2008.
Entrepreneurship, from bench to bedside
accuracy gain of our technology
Starting from an idea, I raised $5M in funding from angel investors, early-stage venture capitalists, NIH/NCI, and NSF to hire a team of scientists and engineers. Together, we developed, validated, and commercialized a novel UV-sensing semiconductor proven to be at least 3x more accurate than competitors' sensors when measuring the UV index from a variety of different sunlight situations. Our technology is currently used by several academic hospitals across the US and Europe and global publicly-traded companies.
We also designed, sponsored, and ran a randomized clinical trial on a population at high-risk of skin cancer. A publication is in preparation.
Collectively, our sensors have measured over 3 million datapoints of personal UV exposure across thousands of people.
Research
My research is in the physics of semiconductors, digital health, and the development of useful statistical methods to analyze large-scale datasets of complex outcome and biological data.
Data science | Genomics
During my studies, I have used Bayesian statistics to cluster protein heights and neural networks to untangle signals. I am currently focusing on developing machine-learning algorithms to analyze large datasets of clinical outcomes and genetic & epigenetic information.
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- Catherine Do, Emmanuel LP Dumont, Martha Salas, Angelica Castano, Huthayfa Mujahed, Leonel Maldonado, Arunjot Singh, Sonia C. DaSilva-Arnold, Govind Bhagat, Soren Lehman, Angela M. Christiano, Subha Madhavan, Peter L. Nagy, Peter H.R. Green, Rena Feinman, Cornelia Trimble, Nicholas P. Illsley, Karen Marder, Lawrence Honig, Catherine Monk, Andre Goy, Kar Chow, Samuel Goldlust, George Kaptain, David Siegel, Benjamin Tycko (2019) Allele-specific DNA methylation is increased in cancers and its dense mapping in normal plus neoplastic cells increases the yield of disease-associated regulatory SNPs, Genome Biol 21, 153 (2020). doi:10.1186/s13059-020-02059-3
- Dumont, E. L. P., Tycko, B. and Do, C. (2020). CloudASM: an ultra-efficient cloud-based pipeline for mapping allele-specific DNA methylation. Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa149
- Pumir, T., Dumont, E., Kaplan, P., & Banerjee, S. (2018). A K-means Cluster-Driven Calibration to Improve the Accuracy of Personal Wearable UV Sensors. ML for Systems, Workshop on ML for Systems at NeurIPS, Accessible here.
- Dumont, E. L. P., Belmas, H. and Hess, H. (2013). Observing the mushroom-to-brush transition for kinesin proteins. Langmuir: the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids, 29(49), pp. 15142–15145. doi:10.1021/la4030712
- Dumont, E. L. P. (2005). Separation aveugle de sources par reseaux de neurones. Mines ParisTech, Master Thesis (in French).
Biophysics
During my PhD, I discovered that in-vitro kinesin-propelled microtubules experience "molecular wear" (Nature Nanotechnology publication). I also measured the height of surface-adhered kinesin proteins as a function of their density and found that their behavior follow the "mushroom-to-brush" transition that P.G. de Gennes, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, predicted for polymers.
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- Dumont, E. L. P., Do, C. and Hess, H. (2015). Molecular wear of microtubules propelled by surface-adhered kinesins. Nature nanotechnology, 10(2), pp. 166–169. doi:10.1038/nnano.2014.334
- Dumont, E. L. P., Belmas, H. and Hess, H. (2013). Observing the mushroom-to-brush transition for kinesin proteins. Langmuir: the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids, 29(49), pp. 15142–15145. doi:10.1021/la4030712
- Hess, H. and Dumont, E. L. P. (2011). Fatigue failure and molecular machine design. Small, 7(12), pp. 1619–1623. doi:10.1002/smll.201100240
- Dumont, E. L. P. (2014). Proteins at interfaces: Conformational behavior and wear. Columbia University, PhD thesis.
Semiconductors
UV-sensing semiconductors have been around for about 60 years but they were never designed to measure solar UV exposure with the same sensitivity as the skin's. As a result, they are very inaccurate when measuring the "UV index" from sunlight (The UV index reflects the damage on the human skin). Using machine-learning, we discovered a low-cost and accurate way of measuring the UV index, which we validated and patented. Such an accuracy usually requires using a $5,000 instrument that is at most portable.
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- Kaplan, P.D. and Dumont, E. L. P. (2021). The Ultraviolet Index Is Well Estimated by the Terrestrial Irradiance at 310 nm. In Sensors. doi.org/10.3390/s21165528
- Banerjee, S., Hoch, E. G., Kaplan, P. D., & Dumont, E. L. P. (2017). A comparative study of wearable ultraviolet radiometers. In 2017 IEEE Life Sciences Conference (LSC). doi:10.1109/lsc.2017.8268131
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2017). Methods, systems, and apparatuses for accurate measurement and real-time feedback of solar ultraviolet exposure. US Patent (No. 9,798,458).
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2018). Methods, systems, and apparatuses for accurate measurement and real-time feedback of solar ultraviolet exposure. US Patent (No. 9,880,052).
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2018). Methods, systems, and apparatuses for accurate measurement and real-time feedback of solar ultraviolet exposure. US Patent (No. 9,880,725).
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2020). Methods, systems, and apparatuses for accurate measurement and real-time feedback of solar ultraviolet exposure. US Patent (No. 10,527,490).
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2020). Methods, systems, and apparatuses for accurate measurement and real-time feedback of solar ultraviolet exposure. US Patent (No. 10,527,491).
- Dumont, E., & Banerjee, S. (2019). Methods for guiding personal limit selection in UV dosimetry. US Patent (No. 10,378,953).
- Dumont, E., Banerjee, S., & Contreras, M. (2018). Sensing device. US Patent (No. D829112:S1).
Digital health
At Shade, we have been very active in advancing the field of digital health. I have contributed to several publications in the space:
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- Dumont, E. L. P. (2015). Remodelling technology transfer. Nature Nanotechnology, 10(2), 184. doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.8
- Appelboom, G., Camacho, E., Abraham, M. E., Bruce, S. S., Dumont, E. L. P., Zacharia, B. E., D’Amico, R., Slomian, J., Reginster, J. Y., Bruyère, O., & Connolly, E. S., Jr. (2014). Smart wearable body sensors for patient self-assessment and monitoring. Archives of Public Health = Archives Belges de Sante Publique, 72(1), 28. doi:10.1186/2049-3258-72-28
- Appelboom, G., LoPresti, M., Reginster, J.-Y., Sander Connolly, E., & Dumont, E. L. P. (2014). The quantified patient: a patient participatory culture. Current Medical Research and Opinion, 30(12), 2585–2587. doi:10.1185/03007995.2014.954032
- Appelboom, G., Taylor, B. E., Bruce, E., Bassile, C. C., Malakidis, C., Yang, A., Youngerman, B., D’Amico, R., Bruce, S., Bruyère, O., Reginster, J.-Y., Dumont, E. L. P., & Connolly, E. S., Jr. (2015). Mobile Phone-Connected Wearable Motion Sensors to Assess Postoperative Mobilization. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 3(3), e78. doi:10.2196/mhealth.3785
- Mitrasinovic, S., Camacho, E., Trivedi, N., Logan, J., Campbell, C., Zilinyi, R., Lieber, B., Bruce, E., Taylor, B., Martineau, D., Dumont, E. L. P., Appelboom, G., & Connolly, E. S., Jr. (2015). Clinical and surgical applications of smart glasses. Technology and Health Care: Official Journal of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine, 23(4), 381–401. doi:10.3233/THC-150910
Several research groups have also used the UV sensors we commercialize to conduct their own research on patient behavior in the sun (I am not a co-author in these publications).
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- Alshurafa, N., Jain, J., Stump, T. K., Spring, B., & Robinson, J. K. (2019). Assessing recall of personal sun exposure by integrating UV dosimeter and self-reported data with a network flow framework. PloS One, 14(12), e0225371. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225371
- Xu, S., Stump, T. K., Jain, J., Alshurafa, N., & Robinson, J. K. (2019). Variation in daily ultraviolet radiation exposure and sun protection behaviours of melanoma survivors: an observational single-arm pilot study with a wearable sensor. The British Journal of Dermatology, 180(2), 413–414. doi:10.1111/bjd.17196
- Stump, T. K., Aspinwall, L. G., Gray, E. L., Xu, S., Maganti, N., Leachman, S. A., Alshurafa, N., & Robinson, J. K. (2018). Daily Minutes of Unprotected Sun Exposure (MUSE) Inventory: Measure description and comparisons to UVR sensor and sun protection survey data. Preventive Medicine Reports, 11, 305–311. doi:10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.07.010
Software
All my recent code is on Github.
- CloudASM: an ultra-efficient cloud-based pipeline for mapping allele-specific methylation from NGS data.
Selected Talks & Invitations
I have given several talks and been invited as a speaker to several conferences. Below we show two of them that found they way to Youtube:
Invited talk at the LDV summit about Shade
Invited talk at TEDx Columbia about my art work.
Interview on French cable news about the Theranos scandale
I have been several times on French cable news to speak about biotechnology and startups. Here is one video (in French)
Full list of conference invitations
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- 2011: Invited speaker at the US-Turkey Advanced Study Institute on Global Healthcare Grand Challenges (Turkey)
- 2015: Invited speaker at the eHealth Summer University (France)
- 2016: Invited speaker at the Rosenman Institute Annual Symposium, UCSF
- 2016: Invited speaker at the {dive} conference (France)
- 2016: Invited speaker at the 3rd annual Dermatology Innovation Forum (Florida)
- 2016: Invited speaker at the Association Technion France (France)
- 2017: Invited speaker at the Hardware Club conference (France)
- 2018: Invited speaker at the Advanced Manufacturing Event, Panel “Hot Sensor
Technologies for Medical Devices” (New York) - 2018: Invited keynote speaker at the LDV Vision Summit, organized by LDV
Capital (New York). - 2018: Invited keynote speaker at the European Tech Night at the Italian
Consulat (New York)
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