Amy B. Smith facts for kids

Amy Smith, born on November 4, 1962, is an American inventor and teacher. She started the MIT D-Lab and is a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at MIT. She is known for creating simple, helpful inventions for people in developing countries.

Amy Smith's Early Life and Education

Amy Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the United States. Her father, Arthur Smith, was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. When Amy was young, her family lived in India for a year while her father worked at a university there. This experience deeply affected her.

Seeing poverty in India made Amy want to help people around the world. She remembered the faces of children who had very little. This inspired her to dedicate her life to making a difference.

Amy studied mechanical engineering at MIT, earning her bachelor's degree in 1984. After spending time with the Peace Corps, she returned to MIT to complete her master's degree in mechanical engineering.

Helping Others with the Peace Corps

Amy Smith joined the Peace Corps and volunteered for four years in Botswana, a country in southern Africa. While there, she noticed that people who needed help the most often didn't have the tools or knowledge to create solutions for their own problems.

Living in the Kalahari Desert, she had a clear idea of her future. She realized she wanted to use engineering to help developing countries. She enjoyed teaching and working as a beekeeper, but she also loved solving problems creatively. She saw how people in Botswana made the most of everything they had, and she enjoyed fixing things for her students.

Amy Smith's Work at MIT

Founding the MIT D-Lab

Amy Smith is a senior lecturer at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She focuses on designing engineering solutions and appropriate technology for developing countries. She started the MIT D-Lab program. This program works with communities worldwide to find practical solutions to global challenges like poverty.

The D-Lab offers many courses and research opportunities for students. It also has research groups and innovation programs. These programs help people learn to create their own solutions.

Smith also helped create Innovations in International Health. This group helps researchers work together to develop medical tools for places with limited resources. She teaches courses like D-Lab: Development and D-Lab Design.

Encouraging Future Engineers

Amy Smith believes in encouraging all students, including girls, to become engineers. She notes that her classes, which focus on humanitarian engineering, often have many female students. She thinks this is because women often want to see how their learning can make a real difference in the world.

Amy Smith's Amazing Inventions

Amy Smith has designed several important inventions. These include the screenless hammer mill and the phase-change incubator. She also helped bring the Malian peanut sheller to use in Africa. She was also a founder of the MIT IDEAS Competition. In 2000, she won the Lemelson–MIT Student Prize for her work.

The Motorized Hammermill

Smith invented a special motorized hammermill. This machine turns grain into flour. She successfully tested it in Senegal. Older mills had a problem: if the screen that filtered out rocks broke, it was hard to replace. It could take months to get a new one.

Amy's mill used a simpler design. It sifted flour using air, so it didn't need a screen. This meant local blacksmiths could build and fix it. She used some of her prize money to produce and share these mills.

The Phase-Change Incubator

Amy Smith also worked on an incubator that doesn't need electricity. An incubator is a device that keeps things warm. This device was designed to help diagnose certain health conditions. The phase-change incubator won the 1999 B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventor's Award. Amy planned to start a company to make these incubators available. She wanted the product to help people, not just make money.

The Corn Sheller

With her D-Lab team, Amy Smith helped create a small, easy-to-make corn sheller. This tool removes dried kernels from an ear of corn. It can be made from aluminum or a sheet of metal. Instructions on how to build this corn sheller are available online under a Creative Commons license on the D-Lab Resources page.

Inspiring Innovation: The MIT IDEAS Competition

Amy Smith co-founded the MIT IDEAS Competition. In this competition, student engineers work in teams. They design projects to improve life in developing countries. Many winning projects have been very successful.

For example, a special water filter that removes harmful substances is now widely used in Nepal. A projector called Kinkajou helps with nighttime reading classes in Mali. There are also systems for testing water safety being used in several countries. These projects show how student ideas can make a big difference.

Global Collaboration: The IDDS

Amy Smith is a main organizer of the International Development Design Summit (IDDS). This event happens every year. People come together to study problems in developing countries. They then create practical solutions.

Smith believes that the best solutions are made with the people who will use them. Bringing diverse groups together leads to many new ideas. The first IDDS in 2007 created great products. These included a refrigerator for rural areas that didn't need electricity. They also made a low-cost greenhouse from recycled materials.

Rethink Relief Design Workshop

In 2011, Amy Smith helped create the Rethink Relief Design Workshop. This workshop focuses on making tools for humanitarian aid. It aims to bridge the gap between immediate help and long-term solutions.

The workshop brought together designers and experts from MIT and the Delft University of Technology. They worked on challenges in relief efforts. These included finding clean water, reusing aid supplies, and improving how first aid gets to people.

Empowering Communities: Creative Capacity Building

Amy Smith and her team at D-Lab developed a new program called Creative Capacity Building (CCB). The main idea of CCB is to help communities develop their own solutions. It aims to put the knowledge and skills directly into the hands of the people who need them.

The CCB program teaches design skills in a simple way. It doesn't require advanced reading or schooling. The goal is for people to identify their problems. Then, they can design and build their own solutions.

Amy Smith's Awards and Recognition

Amy Smith has received many honors for her important work:

• In 1999, she won the Collegiate Inventors Award for her phase-change incubator.
• In 2000, she was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.
• From 2004 to 2009, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a special grant for talented individuals.
• In 2010, Time magazine included Amy Smith in their list of the 100 Most Influential People in the "Thinkers" category.