Co-Founder and Managing Director

Christina Chase is a Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and serves as its Managing Director.

Prior to this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Christina has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community and in 2014, Mashable named her one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene.

In MIT’s School of Engineering, Christina leads the one of the largest undergraduate entrepreneurship classes, Entrepreneurship in Engineering. She helped start and co-direct, StartMIT (formerly Start6), an entrepreneurship bootcamp, with Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. She has served as the Academic Advisor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s 2A Entrepreneurship Track and as an advisor for the Design of Medical Devices and Precision Machine Design classes and has lectured on innovation in the Department of Material Science in their senior capstone design class Materials Projects Laboratory, where students create the next generation of groundbreaking materials, as well as mentored for the MADMEC Material Science Design Competition. She has also taught Applications in Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques, where advanced MIT startup teams are helped to accelerate growth over the semester.

Christina is an entrepreneur with a track record of success in a several industries, starting her first company when she was 18 years old. Most recently she was the CEO and co-founder of Firehoze, an education technology company that focused on online education that involved over a hundred instructors from the most prestigious universities. She has worked with numerous founding teams across industries, including B2B hardware, healthcare IT, materials and coatings, and consumer electronics, and has also led innovation in established companies, such as the photonics company, Labsphere, where as the Director of the Materials and Coating division, in under a year she tripled revenue and led the group to file three key patents for new materials.

Christina is a Techstars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, is a judge for the SXSW Accelerator Competition and former Advisory Board member. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community.

In a past life, Christina was a cyclist where she was one of 12 women selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding.

Anette “Peko” Hosoi is the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Christina Chase and serves as its faculty director.

Prof. Hosoi’s research contributions lie at the juncture of nonlinear hydrodynamics, microfluidics and bio-inspired design. She is a world leader in the study of the hydrodynamics of thin fluid films and in the nonlinear physical interaction of viscous fluids and deformable interfaces. A common theme in her work is the fundamental study of shape, kinematic and rheological optimization of biological fluid systems for locomotion and their application to the emergent field of “soft robotics”. A unique mixture of experimental work, numerical simulation and theoretical analysis characterizes her work, and it combines elements of both engineering design and mathematical optimization. Her work is widely known and internationally respected by physicists, biologists, roboticists and applied mathematicians, as well as engineers, and is used to guide the engineering design of robotic swimmers, crawlers, burrowers and other mechanisms.

Professor Hosoi has served as a member of the Defense Science Study Group and in 2012, was named a fellow of the American Physical Society for “innovative work in thin fluid films and in the study of nonlinear interactions between viscous fluids and deformable interfaces including shape, kinematic, and rheological optimization in biological systems.”

She is also an exceptional and innovative teacher, an inspiring mentor and an outstanding communicator of science in general. She is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the past winner of the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, the MIT School of Engineering Junior Bose Award for Education, the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, and awarded the prestigious Den Hartog Distinguished Educator Award.

When she is not in lab, she can be found at Highland Mountain Bike Park on her downhill rig, snowboarding in British Columbia or monitoring her Fantasy Football team.