Monthly Makerspace Event: Jose Gomez-Marques from MIT comes to LHS
On Tuesday 9/20/16, the LHS Makerspace hosted Jose Gomez-Marques. Janice Alpert (Library Media Specialist) and the LHS student help desk first met Jose last year when they went on a field trip to MIT and toured his health focused makerspace, the Little Devices Lab in the MIT International Design Center . Jose is an engineering designer who directs Little Devices @ MIT and is the creator of MIT’s first course on affordable medical hardware. He is co-inventor of the MEDIKit platform, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies. His other research projects include inhalable vaccine delivery systems, crowdsourced diagnostics, paper microfluidics, and reconfigurable diagnostics for extreme environments. Jose has served on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is a 3 time MIT IDEAS Competition winner, including two Lemelson Awards for International Technology. In 2009, Jose was selected to Technology Review’s TR35, which also named him Humanitarian of the Year. In 2011 he was named a TED Fellow and leads the MakerNurse project with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Jose worked with three different LHS science classes where he taught students about paper fluidity using ampli kits, and explained how medical devices such as nebulizers and epipens work using hands-on demonstrations. Janice Alpert Library Media Specialist), Sarah Perkins (Technology Integration Specialist), and Scott Gordon (Science Department Head) all worked together to make this experience happen and it was a huge success.