April Jane Voet (1958–1997) was an influential founding member of Nanite Systems. After interning as an undergraduate student at the Advanced Dynamics Research Group (ADRG) at the University of Michigan, April completed her PhD in Physiology ahead of schedule in 1982, specializing in prosthetics technology. The newly-founded company eagerly invited her into a project management role in research and development of medical technologies, oversight duties that eventually evolved into the modern Medical Division, which includes the Medical Prosthetics Group and the Medical Devices Group. This position was eventually inherited by her first daughter, Annika Voet, in 1997.

As recognition for her work at Nanite Systems, April Voet was eventually invited to the University of Michigan Medical School as a guest lecturer, and by 1988 held an adjunct faculty position supervising several students at NSMD's Detroit laboratories. She was also influential in the creation of the Consumer Products Division, and recruited Koichi Santei from elsewhere in the company to head it.

Dr. Voet had two marriages, first to a colleague from the ADRG named Thomas Kell, which lasted from 1983 to 1987, and then to Curtis Wright, another faculty member at the University of Michigan Medical School, from mid-1988 to early 1994. Each relationship produced one daughter, Annika Voet in the summer of 1986, and Samantha Wright in late 1988; each would eventually inherit a key role in the company that her mother had created. April's marriages were strained by frequent affairs with other women, sometimes including students. After her separation from Curtis, Samantha went to live with her father, creating a rift between the child and her mother; April's relationship with her older daughter Annika was somewhat more successful.

In January 1995, while testing newly-developed medical scanning equipment, Dr. Voet discovered she had early-onset 5q- myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow cancer. She retired from the company in February. Like many doctors, she chose to spend the remaining two years of her life reconnecting with her children rather than pursue the available treatment options, which were quite limited. Almost two decades later, under the guidance of her daughter Annika, the MDG produced the first successful genome repair treatments for this type of cancer.

Dr. Voet's final significant research contributions were in full-body prosthetics, using the technologies behind Consumer Products Division projects like the SXD to explore the potential for replacing the entire human body with a synthetic alternative. This led to some of the earliest research into artificial nanorobotic metabolic technology, which would be explored again in the early 2000s by the Security Division and eventually perfected by the Consumer Products Division in 2014 as nanite-mediated bioreplacement therapy, or NMBT. A small scandal arose in late 2015 when it was discovered from Dr. Voet's notes that she had successfully applied an NMBT-like technique on one of her students without consent or ethical review.

Santei–Voet–Shortliffe networks

Introduction · Architecture · Adaptability
Koichi Santei · April Voet