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Dr Saul Griffith (MEng ’00)
 For almost as long as he can remember, Saul Griffith has wanted to invent things.
As an eight-year-old, he began filling notebooks with sketches for fanciful machines such as levitating trains and aeroplanes in the shape of manta rays. He also put his ideas into practice, building grappling hooks for climbing trees, giant puppets and rocket-powered toy cars.
Today, Saul is living out his childhood dreams as a professional inventor, engineer and entrepreneur. At the age of 33, he has already developed and commercialised a series of projects ranging from a kite that pulls boats to smart rope that can sense its load.
In recognition of the impact he has already made on the world through his inventions, and his potential for even greater achievements in the future, he has just been awarded a 2007 US$500,000 MacArthur Fellowship to use as he likes. It is a high-profile award commonly nicknamed the "genius grant", although Saul prefers to avoid using the concept.
"I don't believe much in genius," he says. "There are many smart and hard-working people. Taking risks - and working hard on them – is the most important thing."
Saul's road to success as an inventor began with a strong grounding in both science and engineering. After his undergraduate degree in materials science, he went on to a Master of Engineering at the University of Sydney, where he says he "had a great time" and honed his expertise in the fields of composite structures and the mechanical properties of materials.
He then enrolled in the doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, an interdisciplinary environment where his research drew on insights from materials science as well as physics, chemistry and mathematics. It was during this time that his inventions first came to public attention in the United States: he developed a compact device for producing very low-cost prescription lenses - now commercialised under the name OptiOpia - which garnered him two prestigious awards for inventing.
Since leaving MIT, Saul has co-founded his own company, Squid Labs, a design collaboration which provides innovative solutions to complex problems. He now says that taking the chance to strike out on his own as an entrepreneur has turned out to be the right decision.
"The entrepreneurial path seemed to be a good way to move forward with a different set of constraints to working for large companies or within academia," he says. "Think tanks seem to be exactly too much of that: thinking. While I love thinking, I like doing more. At Squid Labs we toyed for a while with describing ourselves as a Do Tank."
For Saul, inventing is often a way to pursue ideas that he is passionate about. His interest in education led him to develop Howtoons, cartoons which teach science and engineering concepts to children in a fun, hands-on way (they reveal, among other things, how to make rockets and hovercrafts out of common household items). His passion for environmental issues and energy-efficiency has shaped the project he is currently working on, a new renewable energy technology.
Saul also has a strong social conscience - he once spent six months living in southern Africa learning about poverty - which has informed projects that have special applications in developing countries, such as pull-string power cords for laptops or his affordable prescription technology.
Other areas where Saul has found inspiration include the structure of biological systems, the properties of membrane-based structures and the science of textiles, which was the field his father worked in. He is also influenced by other creative minds that he knows: he has a diverse network of friends working in fields ranging from biology to physics, animation and the Web. Interacting with them, he says, provides "a tremendous way to fertilise your own ideas and come up with new ones."
Saul loves the process of designing and testing out prototypes for its own sake and says that his working life and his hobbies often blur into each other. Now, he will have an even greater opportunity to follow his imagination because his funding from the MacArthur Fellowship is unfettered, meaning he will be able to pursue ideas in a freeform way rather than tailoring solutions to set problems.
"There are lots of projects with no apparent commercial return, though I feel they should exist," he says, giving the example of a CAD program for designing paper aeroplanes.
"I'll now have resources to execute on things like that: projects with no apparent or immediate reason, just an inkling they would be fun, useful or good. Many of the interesting inventions in the world started out as someone's hobby."
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