Baran D. Sumer, M.D. is a practicing cancer surgeon and co-founder of OncoNano Medicine. Collaborating with Jinming Gao, Ph.D., Baran has invented and developed pH transistor nanoparticles (PTN) that respond to pH changes with a transistor-like, all or nothing behavior based on intermolecular cooperativity. These PTN have transformed tumor detection but also represent a new paradigm of digitizing an analog biologic signal with the exciting possibility of other applications in delivery of therapeutics, cellular targeting and immunotherapy. Baran is currently the T.C. Lupton Professor of Otolaryngology and Chief of the Division of Head and Neck Oncology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He also chairs the Head and Neck Cancer Disease Oriented Team at the NIH Comprehensive Simmons Cancer Center and is the inaugural Program Director for Head and Neck Oncologic Surgery.