Hands, Haiti, and Humanitarianism

Our talk this week will be held virtually on Friday, 11/19 from 5:00 - 6:00. 

While I could go on about how interesting and amazing it is, I think I'll let Jade tell us all about this amazing opportunity to talk about interesting things in a impactful way.

Inhumane Humanitarianism: When good intensions have bad consequences

As a global society, we are coming to realize that our most critical problems exist in the context of complex adaptive systems that are difficult to model and predict. Working with people from various disciplines and backgrounds can help us better understand and adapt our solutions within these systems—whether they involve policy, new processes, or goods and services-- without causing major new problems and is one of the main challenges of humanity moving into future.

Offering effective humanitarian aid in areas experiencing extreme poverty, natural disasters, or acts of war requires a deep understanding the nuances of the needs of each of the parties that hold a stake—positive or negative— in that area.

Join Jade as she relates her first- “hand” experiences in the field of upper-limb prosthetics needs assessment—when it’s gone terribly wrong and what it looks like when it is done right-- and lessons learned from time spent doing collaborative clinical, design, and ethnographic research in the field in the low-resource, disaster affected area of Haiti.

Jade Myers

Jade holds positions as both Visiting Scientist at the RIT LiveAbility Lab and Adjunct Faculty within the Biomedical Engineering Department and the School of Individualized Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has served as Research & Development Associate and Haiti Project Team Lead for LimbForge (in partnership with Victoria Hand Project), a non-profit specializing in increasing access to quality prostheses for underserved communities throughout the world and has collaborated with Doctors without Borders (MSF) on international ultra-low-cost medical device projects involving 3D printing within low-income countries, disaster areas and war zones. Her team’s work has been showcased in such venues as Time magazine and was recently on display at Hartford University as a part of the Design Museum installation, “Bespoke Bodies: The Design & Craft of Prosthetics.” Its accompanying book features a prosthetic her team designed on its cover. Jade instructs and co-instructs several courses including “Medical Device Design,” “Wicked Problems,” and "3D-Technologies for Prosthetic Applications," an interdisciplinary, project-based class that leverages 3D-printing, scanning, and CAD to engage students in the many facets of prosthetic design. Concurrently a Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Ph.D. student at RIT, her research centers on finding novel ways to improve the design of prosthetic sockets using 3D-printable lattice structures, and she ultimately strives to increase access to low-cost, medical grade 3D-printed prosthetic devices for those with the greatest need across the globe. Jade is a 2012 alumnus of FLCC and was a member of its Honors program.