Her father, Arthur Smith, was an electrical engineering professor at MIT. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal. See what Amy Smith (mit_frau) has discovered on Pinterest, the world's biggest collection of ideas. Unlike most inventors, Smith wants her inventions to be adopted as broadly and inexpensively as possible, rather than controlling them through patents.
Amy Smith won the 2000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Inventiveness. Arthur Smith took his family to India for a year when Amy was growing up while he worked at a university there.

Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. Amy Smith is the Founding Director of MIT D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Smith says that being exposed to severe poverty as a child made her want to do something to help kids around the world. It's very different from growing up in a Boston suburb", he said. "I think that set a lot of things in motion for her. "Living in India is something that stayed with m…