Amy B. Smith
| Amy B. Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 4, 1962 Lexington, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Institutions | Peace Corps, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Notable awards | MacArthur Fellowship |
Amy Smith (born November 4, 1962) is an American inventor, educator, and founder of D-Lab at MIT. She works to develop technologies and build creative capacity internationally.
Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her father, Arthur Smith, was an electrical engineering professor at MIT. Arthur Smith took his family to India for a year when Amy was growing up while he worked at a university there. "I think that set a lot of things in motion for her. It's very different from growing up in a Boston suburb", he said. Smith says that being exposed to severe poverty as a child made her want to do something to help kids around the world. "Living in India is something that stayed with me—I could put faces on the kids who had so little money."
Smith received her Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1984. Smith returned to MIT after the Peace Corps to get her master's degree in mechanical engineering.
Smith joined the Peace Corps serving four years as a volunteer in Botswana. During her Peace Corps service she was struck by the fact that "the most needy are often the least empowered to invent solutions to their problems." While she was serving in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, she decided what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. "At one point I had sort of an epiphany, sitting at my desk looking out over the bush, when I realized I wanted to do engineering for developing countries", Smith said. "In Botswana, I was teaching and then working for the ministry of agriculture as a beekeeper, and I remember thinking to myself that I really liked doing development work, but I wished could do some engineering too, because I like creative problem solving", says Smith. "People in the developing world scrape every last ounce of life that they can out of objects, and my students used to bring me things to fix, and I always enjoyed being able to do that."
She is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT specializing in engineering design and appropriate technology for developing countries. She founded the D-Lab program at MIT which introduces students to technological, social, and economic problems of the Third World. She also co-founded Innovations in International Health to facilitate collaboration among researchers around the world to develop medical technologies for resource-poor settings. She teaches the courses SP.721/11.025: D-Lab: Development and SP.722/2.722: D-Lab Design. She has taught in the past 2.72: Elements of Mechanical Design.
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