UTEP Professor Global Humanitarian Engineering Award Finalist

October 18, 2013 | UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

Roger Gonzalez

Roger Gonzalez, Ph.D., UTEP alumnus (BSME, '86), director for the UTEP Leadership Engineering Program, and professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering, has been nominated as a finalist for the Global Humanitarian Engineer of the Year award.

The award will be presented at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, California Tuesday, Oct. 22.

This will be the first time the Engineer of the Year and Global Humanitarian Engineering Project of the Year awards will be presented at the conference.

The awards celebrate the valuable contribution that engineers make towards improving the lives of those less fortunate. In addition, they recognize outstanding achievement, provide role models and highlight lesser-known roles of engineering in society.

Gonzalez has been nominated for his work with LIMBS International, which he founded in 2004. The nonprofit organization develops durable, low cost prosthetics that can be locally fabricated.

Part of this project has included working with his university students in Africa, Asia, Europe, Haiti, Australia, and Latin America. LIMBS International has fitted hundreds of amputees with the organization's signature product, the M1 Knee.

Gonzalez has been dedicated to humanitarian engineering for many years, with more than 100 publications on the topic and multiple prestigious awards for his international humanitarian endeavors.