Amy Smith: Service Engineering

Amy B. Smith is an inventor who creates useful technologies for others. Yet before she could do that, she had to invent something else: a way to channel her skills into a path that was meaningful to her. "When I was working towards my bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering here in the 1980s, the chief focus in the field seemed to be cars and bombs," she says. "I don't drive and I don't like war, so I had to find my own way."

Raised with the value of serving others, and partly inspired by a year she spent in India as a child, Amy decided to join the Peace Corps. It was while working in Botswana that she saw first hand that populations most in need of innovative technological solutions often lack the skills and resources to create them. Upon returning to MIT in the 1990s, she requested and received funding to travel to Africa to identify engineering projects. Her master's thesis was a mechanized, low-cost grain mill that not only worked better than previous methods, but also used less energy and cost less than a quarter of the price of existing mills.

Some of her other inventions include a laboratory incubator that doesn't require electricity and a low-cost chlorination system for community water supplies. It's not surprising that she is the co-founder of the MIT IDEAS Competition, which encourages teams to develop and implement projects that make a positive change in the world. Her ingenuity and commitment to serving the needs of the less fortunate have been well-recognized: in 2000, Amy became the first female winner of the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for invention and in 2004, her work earned her a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (the "genius grant").