Inventors

Josh Siegel is a renaissance man. Tinkering with car parts and electronics in his home workshop has kept him busy throughout his life and supplements his creative work as a professor at Michigan State University’s Deep Technology Lab. He calls this tinkering, even if it is done without a clearly stated goal, “building an intellectual…

Matthew Rooda and Abraham Espinoza couldn’t have come from more dissimilar backgrounds. Matt grew up working in pork production in America’s heartland; Abe was a mischievous boarding school student in Mexico. When the duo met at Buckeye Community College they began channeling their curiosity onto a laser focus on the massive problem of piglet crushing…

Katherine Jin has always been an innovator. As a young girl, she was charged with feeding her baby sister. Finding the job of holding the bottle for sissy to be boring, she modified an articulating lamp to hold a baby bottle at just the right angle. In college, Katherine and some friends learned of problems…

Nicole Black has been creating solutions since she was a little girl. As a girl, she grappled with hearing loss due to a perforated eardrum and wondered “why is such a simple problem so complicated?” After the Boston Marathon Bombing left countless others with a similar injury, she began a research collaboration with surgeons at…

When Mira Moufarrej was a young girl her grandmother was diagnosed with rapidly progressing cancer. When she passed shortly after her initial diagnosis, Mira felt helpless. At first Mira thought she wanted to be a physician. At Stanford, she quickly discovered the possibilities in the field of bio-engineering, she knew she had found her passion.…

Corten Singer and Tomás Vega, self-proclaimed Makers and hardware hackers, had a wheelchair-bound friend Danny with low vision who they wanted to help become more independent. One of Danny’s major challenges was that he was unable to negotiate unfamiliar terrain. Even something as simple as uneven ground or a curb cut could prove deadly for…

Geoff von Maltzahn was a unique child. He didn’t learn to read until he was eight years old. But he had a deep understanding of the world around him that others began to notice. Geoff excelled at math and had a passion for art which led him to explore the world around him in intricate…

Growing up amid the aftermath of civil war, David Sengeh was inspired to improve prosthetic limbs, observing the challenges faced by amputees firsthand. He innovatively used MRI scans to design more comfortable prosthetic sockets through 3D printing, testing his solutions with veterans and Boston Marathon bombing survivors. David’s work led to a TED fellowship in…

Growing up in Ghana, Mercy Asiedu saw firsthand the inequities of health care in developing nations. Each year about 500,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and more than half of them do not survive. About 90% of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries because more than half of women have never been…

Paige Balcom was visiting Uganda as a Fulbright Scholar when she became fascinated by the challenges of life in Gulu. When economic forces there conspired to trap millions of plastic bottles in the nation’s ecosystem without any local options for recycling, Paige, then a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, decided to dedicate her research to…