Amos Winter is the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Amos’s work focuses on creating high-performance, low-cost technologies for resource-constrained communities around the world. His portfolio includes innovations for irrigation, desalination, clean energy, and global health, many of which have been commercialized through startup companies or licenses. Recent examples include drip irrigation emitters that cut pumping power by 50% and reduce the cost of solar-powered irrigation by up to 40%; desalination solutions that directly convert solar energy to water production without battery storage; and plastic prosthetic feet that perform as well as or better than industry-standard carbon-fiber feet that cost 100 times as much. The scientific research associated with these innovations has appeared in top academic journals, including Nature Scientific Reports, Nature Water, Irrigation Science, Desalination, and the Journal of Mechanical Design.
As a researcher, consultant, and speaker on innovation, Amos has partnered with numerous leading companies creating global products, including the Tata Group, Toro, BASF, Xylem, Mahindra, Ferrari, Suez, PepsiCo, and GE Vernova. Major governmental and intergovernmental funders of Amos’s research program have included USAID, UNICEF, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the US Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation. In 2024, Amos’s research group, formerly GEAR Lab, was elevated to GEAR Center, an endowed MIT-wide center, through a generous gift from Lisa Yang. Amos recently co-founded the startup GEAR Works, to translate and disseminate innovations created through GEAR Center.
Amos honed his skills designing products for global markets through the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC) wheelchair, which was featured in his and VG Govindarajan’s article “Engineering Reverse Innovations,” winner of the 2015 McKinsey Award for best article of the year in Harvard Business Review. The LFC was successfully commercialized by GRIT, a company co-founded by Amos, which continues to profitably sell a reverse innovation variant to the US market. Amos’s work has also been recognized with the ASME/Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal, an NSF CAREER award, an R&D 100 award, and being named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35).
Amos is also an accomplished teacher, leading classes at MIT on mechanical design, product design, and design for low-resource settings. He received the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, the highest award given to a junior faculty member at MIT for teaching, research, and service, and was recently named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT’s highest honor for undergraduate education.
Amos lives with his wife and son in Carlisle, MA. In his spare time, he enjoys building, breaking, fixing, and racing vintage cars, much of which is chronicled on his theMITchanic Instagram account.
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