David Moinina Sengeh

The World of Biomechatronics

As a child, David Sengeh was so inquisitive adults around him often got a little tired of the constant questions that came to his young mind. In 2004, he left his native Sierra Leone for a scholarship in Norway, followed by a stint at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then onto MIT's Media Lab, where he did pioneering research into a better fit for leg prostheses.

In his youth, Sengeh witnessed the civil war in his homeland. Chopping off limbs was one of the ways in which the warring groups of the population spurred fears. After the war, many people did not use the prostheses provided to them because they yielded too much pain. At MIT as a Ph.D. candidate, he developed a method to tailor the prosthesis based on scans of the stump using a 3D printer socket. This discovery is changing the entire prosthesis industry.

In the meantime Sengeh is encouraging young people in his own country as well as the rest of Africa to be creative and search for solutions against diseases like malaria. He also launched Innovate Salone, a school program in Sierra Leone that encourages children to use their creativity and develop innovations that could change their world. Wired magazine put him on the Smart List in 2013, he has been made a TED Fellow and Forbes included him in the 30 Under 30 in Technology for 2013. On April 9th, he won the 2014 Lemelson-MIT National Collegiate Student Prize for his innovative and promising contributions to improving health care.