2022 Hackster Impact Winners Announced
During Impact Summit, we announced that Manu Prakash, Shah Selbe, and Michel André are this year's Hackster Impact Award winners.
The Hackster Impact Award recognizes a team or an individual who represents a significant contribution to using technology to make the world a better place. To match our Impact Summit theme of air and water supply, we awarded three technologists who've made a significant impact with their various initiatives.
Learn more about each of the three winners from this year and how they’ve contributed to making the world a better place with their technological projects, initiatives, and innovations.
Manu Prakash
Manu Prakash is a professor at Stanford University and OSHWA trailblazer fellow, where his curiosity-driven lab is dedicated to inventing, building, and scaling up “frugal science” tools to democratize access to science, medical diagnostics, and convening global citizen science communities to tackle environmental challenges. He and his team have created many citizen science open hardware tools including Foldscope, a $1 origami microscope that’s created the world’s largest microscopy program with more than 1.7 Million microscopes deployed around the world. Foldscope won a Golden Goose Award, which recognizes scientists whose federally funded basic research has led to innovations or inventions with significant impact on humanity or society. By implementing a “frugal science” philosophy into his initiatives, Manu’s team is bringing the spirit of creativity into open-source projects so innovators can make huge impacts with few resources. Read Manu's publications to learn more about his efforts to gather biological data on marine life, track the spread of pathogens and other initiatives he and his team have worked on.
Shah Selbe
Shah Selbe is a conservation technologist, rocket scientist, photographer, and managing director of FieldKit - an open-source software and hardware platform that helps collect and share field-based research data and share this data with interactive visualizations. FieldKit is a project by Conservify, which Shah founded to build an “open conservation” community within conservation technology and create the tools and innovation pipeline to make this a reality. He is deeply passionate about using open-source technology for better conservation efforts including:
- Gathering data about a mysterious boiling river in the Peruvian Amazon with a robotic water quality sampling probe
- Monitoring the Bow Glacier’s melting process with an open-source glacier melting monitoring platform
- Preventing illegal shark finning and tracking sperm whales and sharks across ocean environments with open-source GPS tracking devices
Michel André
Michel André is a French bioacoustics scientist who has a deep passion for the protection of marine life, specifically whales. Michel has created a system called WACS (Whale Anti-Collision System) that mitigates the risk of whales colliding with ships. Based on Michel’s research, he found that several sperm whales had collided with passenger ferries in the region of the Canary Islands. These collisions happen quite often and can lead to severe injury and even death for these whales. By capturing the sounds produced by the whales in real-time and sending the position of the whale to the ship's captain so they know that in two or three or 10 miles they might encounter a whale, it allows the voyager to change their course to prevent a collision. Learn more about Michel André's work and research to see how he's mastered Bioacoustics.
Congratulations and Keep on Creating!
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Hackster Impact Awards! Your dedication, passion, skill, and creativity have had an enormous positive impact on protecting our environment and wildlife.
We hope to see even more impactful initiatives in the future that protect our planet with technological breakthroughs. To our community, keep sharing your impactful projects by tagging your projects under the following topic channels to show your work and efforts to create a better sustainable future: