Page 65 - Innovation Delaware 2019

ride-sharing. She won several pitch com- petitions while promoting her idea and is now developing a prototype. Deborah is the founder of the Student Leadership Initiative Program, a group that mentors younger students and creates leadership opportunities for them. She has also spent much of her high school years considering possible reforms to the education system and plans to write a book on the subject later this year.
MORGAN ROLLINS:
BUILDING SMARTER PROSTHESES
Entering her teenage years, soccer had been Morgan Rollins’ passion. But a series of shoulder surgeries — five in five years — would end her career as a goalkeeper and point her toward a life devoted to helping those who have suffered far more debilitating physical hardships.
Rollins, 20, a 2017 graduate of Tower Hill School in Wilmington, is finishing her sophomore year at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is
majoring in biomechanical engineering and has started a student organization, Temple Prosthetics and Orthotics, whose members plan to make prosthetic devices and provide them, free of charge, to veterans and others who cannot afford
to pay for them.
Early in her high school days, two
surgeries and the subsequent physi-
cal therapy fueled her interest in the health sciences. Classes in anatomy and physics as a junior steered her toward biomechanics, and prompted Rollins and a classmate to build a 3D-printed, voice-activated prosthetic hand. As a senior, she developed a prosthetic leg as part of an independent project with art teacher Richard Pierce.
“She was very self-motivated and re- lentless,” recalls Christine Morrow, her anatomy teacher at Tower Hill. “If her prosthesis wasn’t working according to her design, she didn’t see it as failure, but an opportunity to learn and make it better — and she succeeded.”
THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION “As a student engineer, she understood
the importance of creating prototypes to work out designs and processes, and that this full immersion would ultimately lead to her success,” Pierce adds.
In her senior year, Rollins had surgery for the fourth time. “I realized, while spending six weeks with my arm in a sling, that other people have no arms for the rest of their lives,” she says.
Late in her freshman year at Temple, Rollins received a $4,000 research grant through the school to continue working on a myoelectric prosthesis, with an aim of maintaining quality while controlling costs. Myoelectric prostheses — exter- nally powered artificial limbs that are controlled with the electrical signals generated naturally by muscles — typically cost $5,000 each. Rollins and her team are hoping to make four or five prostheses with the grant by
being resourceful with the materials, using guitar strings for the tendons and 3D-printing many of the materials.
MORGAN ROLLINS
INNOVATION DELAWARE 63
JUSTIN HEYES/MOONLOOP PHOTOGRAPHY