Posted September 29, 2015
Matthew Dion, a Ph.D. student in BME at RPI, participated in the Global Engineering Teams consortium as a representative of RPI last year. GET is a consortium of universities from around the world whose mission is to provide engineering students with unique international, interdisciplinary design experiences. (RPI has participated for three years and Prof. Eric Ledet is the RPI coordinator/faculty sponsor). Matthew and his teammates from the US, Brazil, and Germany took on a humanitarian challenge for their GET project and conceived of a very unique design solution to that challenge. Specifically, their project dealt with bringing low cost simple prosthetic limbs to under-developed areas of the world. When the GET cycle was over last year, they were so compelled with the project that they have continued working on it. Recently, they applied for funding through a very competitive award mechanism in Germany to ramp up their efforts and transition toward commercialization. They have just found out today that they have been awarded a €200,000 grant to continue the work through the funding program EXIST Gründerstipendium.