Amos Winter is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor and the Director of the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research and teaching focus on the marriage of mechanical design theory and user-centered product design to create simple, elegant technological solutions for use in highly constrained environments.

The majority of Prof. Winter’s research relates to design for emerging markets and developing countries. His current projects include creating a low-cost, passive prosthetic knee that can replicate normative walking kinematics; redesigning the Jaipur Foot – the most commonly distributed prosthetic foot in the world; village-scale photovoltaic-powered electrodialysis desalination systems and home-use water purifiers; low-pressure, low-power off-grid drip irrigation systems; high specific power, single-cylinder turbocharged engines; and small-scale tractor technologies. Prof. Winter teaches 2.76 “Global Engineering”, a graduate-level mechanical design course that teaches students how to apply rigorous engineering theory to emerging market challenges. He is the principal inventor of the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC), an all-terrain wheelchair designed for developing countries that was a winner of a 2010 R&D 100 award and was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s top innovations in 2011. He is a founder of Global Research Innovation and Technology (GRIT), a company manufacturing and distributing the LFC that won MassChallenge, the world’s largest startup and accelerator competition, in 2012.