When you hear the term “bionic arm”, it’s very possible you think of something totally futuristic, or maybe even something robotic like you’d find in a factory. You probably wouldn’t think of a bionic prosthetic limb designed to fit a child and painted in a variety of bright colors. 

Well, that’s what University of Central Florida-based non-profit Limbitless Solutions does. Limbitless Solutions was founded by UCF alumni Albert Manero and John Sparkman in 2014 and has since grown from a kitchen table to a venture working toward FDA approval to make their bionic prosthetics prescription-available to patients with limb differences.

 But you can hear about it from Albert and John themselves in the podcast episode above, and stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content!

In this seventh installment of Engineering Heroes, sponsored by Wind River, we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Karisa Schreck, an assistant professor of neurology, oncology, and neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, where she also co-directs the BRAF Brain Tumor Center.

Dr. Schreck grew up with four brothers and knew from a very young age that she had passions for learning and helping people. So it made sense that when the time came for higher education, she pursued an MD-PhD. She combined multiple interests in medicine and biomedical engineering in this pursuit, and has been implementing her knowledge of neural networks in research of mutated proteins, like the BRAF mutation, that occur in patients with brain cancer in an attempt to develop a treatment or medicine to improve their prognosis.

But you can hear from Dr. Schreck herself, as well as her mentor Dr. Jaishri Blakely, in the podcast episode above. Stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content!

In this fifth installment of Engineering Heroes, sponsored by Wind River, we’d like to introduce you to Anton Riström, a Department Manager at Aker Solutions, an engineering company that focuses on building infrastructure for renewable energy solutions.

With the ever-present and growing threat of climate change, sustainability is a hot button topic and has been for years now — but advancements in technological capabilities are allowing innovators to finding more and more creative sustainable energy solutions. One such method you may not be familiar with is subsea compression, which is a way to draw naturally occurring gas out from the seabed.

Luckily, we have people like Anton Riström, an expert in using computational fluid dynamics in simulation technologies that helped greatly in projects like the 2015 Åsgard Subsea Compression Project, where he and a team at Aker Solutions used that tech to develop digital twins of 17-meter-tall cooling chambers.

But you can hear directly from Anton and his team member Jesper Persson in the podcast episode above, and stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content!

In this fifth installment of Engineering Heroes, sponsored by Wind River, we’d like to introduce you to Samer Mabrouk, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Originally from Egypt, Samer grew up fascinated with building things, always asking for things like Legos as rewards when he did well in school. Couple that with growing up in during the dawn and evolution of smartphone technology, and Samer’s love for engineering was solidified.

Today, as a postdoc research fellow, he’s drawn on his background in embedded to equip IVs with sensors that can detect potentially dangerous infiltration events and alert keep medical staff immediately. Sometimes, IVs can move after they’ve been inserted into a vein, or the vein can weaken — in other words, an IV infiltration.

But you can hear directly from Samer and his colleague Tommy Cunningham in the podcast above, and stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content!

In this fourth installment of our Engineering Heroes series, sponsored by Wind River, we honor Levi Zima, an RF Microwave Engineer. Levi was born in Oregon, spent several years of childhood in Wisconsin, and currently resides in Florida, just north of Orlando.

Levi may have just recently graduated from the University of Central Florida, but he’s been coding since he was 7 years old. Having started development so young, and been raised around it with his family also entrenched in the engineering world, Levi is one person who understands how useful a deep background can be for young, aspiring engineers. He even created a small radio kit that was specifically designed to teach children about how radio works and how to solder.  He's also worked on boards using the home automation protocol Z-Wave.

But check out the podcast to hear from Levi himself, as well as his father, and stay tuned for more Engineering Heroes content.

Writing firmware for a state-of-the-art embedded system is no easy task. Now imagine trying to accomplish that task with bombs going off in your country, and not knowing where the next one will hit. That’s the predicament Valentyn Hlukhotskyy and his team at IT services and consulting company Euristiq faced as they worked on developing a cloud platform for a U.S.-based health and fitness company while residing in Ukraine. That alone would make Valentyn an Engineering Hero, but Valentyn himself can tell you about it much better than we can.

Hear it right from the source in this next installment of Engineering Heroes, sponsored by Wind River.

In the second installment of our Engineering Heroes series, sponsored by Wind River, we honor Nandini Kappiah, a Senior Director of Software Engineering at Google. Nandini grew up in Bangalore, India, and didn’t own a computer until she decided to pursue software engineering in college at 18 years old.

Now, she manages 180 people in the Android group at Google, focusing on the areas of location, authentication, and personal safety. Specifically, Nandini and her team contributed to the development of California’s ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system. 

The ShakeAlert system impacts millions of Android device users all along the west coast of the U.S. thanks to Nandini and her team, seismologic expertise from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and several other partners. Tune in to hear from Nandini herself about how she manages her day-to-day life.

Welcome to the podcast portion of our Engineering Heroes series, where we recognize design engineers and developers who do amazing work that impacts countless lives around the world. They are not known to most and receive very little credit outside of the teams they work with. And frankly, our heroes are fine with that — but we think they deserve some recognition. If not for their incredible innovations, many of our modern inventions would not exist, or would have come far later.

The hero that’s honored in this podcast was involved in a project related to the world-famous International Space Station, flight-qualifying still-maturing hardware for use in the Intelligent Space Station Interface. Yet the name Daire McNamara remains mostly unknown.

Daire, a lifelong resident of Ireland, works as a director, project manager, and firmware developer at Emdalo Technologies. Emdalo is a small embedded software development company that specializes in chip bring-up, among other engineering disciplines like embedded Linux, combining it with the appropriate hardware to perform AI at the IoT Edge.

But we’d like Daire and those who worked with him to tell you about his role in the ISS project. Check out the podcast.

Note that the video of Daire went live last week.

The Engineering Heroes program is brought to you by Wind River.