February 15, 2006 – Cambridge , MA
A PDF of this release is available here.
Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich receiving the
Lemelson-MIT 2006 $30k Student Prize from
Mrs. Dorothy Lemelson.
(click on image for larger view)
Terrafugia co-founder and CEO Carl Dietrich was awarded a cash prize of $30,000 for being the most innovative student at MIT in the past year. The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner's latest achievement is to make personal travel easier and solve the problem of America 's congested highways and major airports.
“Carl joins a long line of independent inventors who are passionate about finding innovative ways to address society's fundamental problems,” said Merton Flemings, director of the Lemelson-MIT Program, which sponsors the award. “He is not afraid to tackle the challenges many inventors before him have abandoned. Carl's ability to look at big problems in creative ways and come up with practical solutions makes him just the type of person we look to honor with the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.”
“In my 30 years as a teacher [at MIT], I cannot recall a clearer example of the Edison mindset,” said MIT Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, one of Dietrich's recommenders for the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. “Carl is routinely cycling back and forth between what is known and what is possible.”
Dietrich traces his passion for invention and design back to the dining room table of his family's Sausalito, Calif. home where he watched his father build model planes. He remembers one model in particular, a Red Baron tri-plane that later hung from his bedroom ceiling and inspired his desire to fly.
When he was eight years old, Dietrich began saving money to take flight lessons and earn his pilot's license, which he did when he turned 17. In high school, he further developed his interest in aerospace engineering. During his junior year, he designed a remote-controlled airplane; his senior project was a full-scale hydrogen-powered airplane.
These days, Dietrich finds inspiration in large-scale challenges that push the limits of his abilities and imagination. “The things I get inspired by now tend to be fundamental problems, like increasing personal mobility and finding better energy sources than hydrocarbon fuels,” he said. “These kinds of grand-scale things I try to adopt as my own personal goals. There are lots of smart people with lots of resources working on these problems, certainly. Still, I think there is a role that can be played by us independent inventor types who are trying to think up other unique ways of working on them. It never hurts to have a couple more people thinking about big problems,” he said.
About the Lemelson-MIT Program
The Lemelson-MIT Program aims to enable and inspire young people to pursue creative lives and careers. It particularly encourages young people to engage in invention and to pursue sustainable new solutions to real world problems. It accomplishes this mission through outreach activities and annual awards, including the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the largest single award in the United States for invention.
Jerome H. Lemelson, one of the world's most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation, a private philanthropy that celebrates and supports inventors and entrepreneurs in order to strengthen social and economic life. More information is online at http://web.mit.edu/invent .
About the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize
The $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is awarded annually to an MIT senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways. A distinguished panel of MIT alumni and associates including scientists, technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs chooses the winner.