Dina Katabi is one of this year's 24 recipients of the MacArthur Fellow, or commonly known as the "Genius Awards". She will receive $625,000 award, paid over five years.
Katabi has been teaching in MIT since 2003. Most of her work centers on making wireless networks and devices more efficient and secure to use.
Now she's exploring how to use Wi-Fi radio signals to track people through walls, similar like X-Ray vision. The Wi-Fi signals will traverse through walls and obstacles to reflect off a human body.
"We don't have a Superman here yet," said Katabi. "We can't see the silhouette of a person. We see the person like a blob, which we can use to trace how the person is moving behind a wall."
The tech could be used by firefighters to find victims inside a burning building or locate trapped hostages or survivors in rubble.
But how would Katabi spend that money? She doesn't know just yet.