Amy B. Smith

Smith co-founded the MIT IDEAS Competition where teams of student engineers design projects to make life easier in the developing world. "Some of the IDEAS competition winners have been very successful", says Smith. "The compound water filter, which removes arsenic and pathogens, is now deployed quite extensively in Nepal. The Kinkajou microfilm projector, used in nighttime literacy classes, is being deployed in Mali. We’re working to commercialize a system for testing water for potability. It's in the field in several countries, but not on a widespread basis. We're looking towards doing a trial of aerosol vaccines in Pakistan, so that's exciting."

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 was instrumental in creating the Rethink Relief Design Workshop in 2011. Rethink Relief is "dedicated to creating technologies for humanitarian relief that specifically address the gap between short-term relief and long-term sustainable development."

The workshop was co-organized in October 2011 by Industrial Design faculty at the Delft University of Technology and D-Lab of MIT. It brought together 26 people to explore the differences in thinking by relief organizations, development organizations, and designers. Groups worked throughout a week to create concepts and prototypes to address challenges in relief work. These addressed clean water availability, re-purposing of aid materials, transportation challenges, and first aid supply logistics.

WorldChanging reported on August 14, 2007 that the results from the first International Development Design Summit had been very positive with end products including an off-grid refrigeration unit tailored for rural areas using an evaporative cooling method to store perishable food and a low-cost greenhouse from recycled and widely available materials.

Smith's designs include the screenless hammer mill and the phase-change incubator, and she is also involved with the application of the Malian peanut sheller in Africa. She is also one of the founders of the popular MIT IDEAS Competition. In 2000 Smith won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize that honors inventors who are also good role models.

Smith worked on an incubator that requires no electricity. The device was originally designed to diagnose sexually transmitted diseases. The phase change incubator won the 1999 B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventor's Award for $20,000. Smith planned to start a company around the incubator. "I'm not a person who likes money, so whether it makes a profit is neither here nor there", Smith said. "I didn't want to be in the position of closing down the product because it wasn't making money. That's not the point of the product."

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.

Amy Smith (born November 4, 1962) is an American inventor, educator, and founder of MIT D-Lab and Senior Lecturer of Mechancial Engineering at MIT.