WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2008 | 10:00 to 11:00 AM | Olin Auditorium

AMY SMITH, M.S.E.
Inventor and Instructor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Engineering

Spring 2007 Big Conversations Speaker
Olin Students for Awesome, SERV and the Big Conversations Committee are pleased to announce the Spring 2007 Big Conversations which will focus on appropriate technologies. The keynote speaker is Amy Smith, who will discuss "What's Important".  

For more details: check out Amy's biography below, the schedule page of this website, and our bibliography page on appropriate technologies.

Amy Smith is an inventor and teacher dedicated to developing technologies that optimize limited resources and solve seemingly intractable problems in developing countries. As a mechanical engineer, she creates life-enhancing solutions and labor-saving technologies for people at the far end of dirt roads in the world's most remote societies—people facing crises that erupt in health clinics with no electricity and in villages with no clean water. Striking in their simplicity and effectiveness, her inventions include grain-grinding hammer mills, water-purification devices, and field incubators for biologic testing.

She graduated from MIT in 1984 and worked for 4 years in Botswana with the US Peace Corps, where she won the 1988 JFK Peace Corps Volunteer of the Year Award, representing over 2,500 volunteers in Africa. She returned to MIT to pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering, focusing on engineering design for developing countries. In 1994, she received the Carroll Wilson Award to travel to Senegal to test the screenless hammer mill that she designed for her master's thesis. In 1996, she started the Designs for Developing Countries Project at MIT, a program that works with organizations in developing countries to identify technical needs and incorporate them into hands-on design seminars for undergraduate students. One of Ms. Smith's areas of research focuses on redesigning medical laboratory equipment so that it can be used in remote areas of developing countries. She won the 1999 BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventor's Award for her work on a phase-change incubator that operates without electricity and also won the 2000 MIT-Lemelson Student Prize for Invention. In 2001 she co-founded the Service Learning program at MIT and started the Public Service Design Seminars as part of this initiative. She is also one of the co-founders of the MIT IDEAS Competition. In 2003 she began teaching D-Lab, a series of courses and field trips that focus on international development, appropriate technologies, and sustainable solutions for communities in developing countries. In 2004 she was selected as a MacArthur Fellow, recognizing her efforts in creating technologies to improve lives in the developing world and for finding opportunities to inspire students to do the same.