To the Chief Science Advisor's Youth Council,
I highly recommend Nathaniel Bechard to your CSA Youth Council. At only 18, he would be one of your younger members, yet has a unique perspective.
Nathaniel has worked for the last two years, first as an unpaid volunteer and then as a contractor, as the chief electrical and mechanical designer of the non-profit PolyVent ventilator, which is now named the PolyVent Educational Platform. Although a teenager, he led a team of international professional engineers in the design and construction of the PolyVent, the world's most open mechanical ventilator for human respiration.
As you no doubt know, COVID-19 created the very real possibility that there would be a shortage of ventilators in the Western world, to say nothing of low- and middle-income countries. At one time over 100 teams were working on building emergency pandemic ventilators. PolyVent was originally co-created by Nathaniel to be an emergency medical device for both the wealthy nations and the less-wealthy nations. Based from the beginning on the principle of free-libre open source designs that any firm could use as a starting point to create a regulatory body-authorized medical device, PolyVent is one of the few projects still actively working. It is now the word's most open human respiration research and educational platform, and it wouldn't exist without Nathaniel.
Although it was a team effort, Nathaniel largely:
- Designed the mechanical structure, including the frame, the complete airway passage, and the control module.
- Selected the valves, sensors, microcontrollers, and electronic components.
- Completely designed an extensible, card-based control module for the valves and sensors that allows the addition of new functionality for research purposes.
- Physically manufactured two PolyVents, including milling parts, 3D printing parts, folding sheet metal, riveting, and the complete construction and testing of the functional ventilator.
Only the software for the PolyVent was largely done by myself and not Nathaniel.
Nathaniel thus is a "maker" par excellence---he represents the Canadian youths who are designing and building sophisticated new devices and art with a level of innovation bordering on research based on the relatively accessible technologies of 3D-printing, CNC milling, microelectronics, single-board computers, and powerful open-source programming tools.
I intend to recommend Nathaniel very highly for Universities when he applies, but think he is ideal for your Youth Council. As a thought-leader in the software industry, an active researcher in mathematics, computer science, and mechanical engineering, a US Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013, the cofounder of the 18F technology incubator in the US Federal government and the director of a research non-profit dedicated to invention in the public interest, I have seen a lot of student and professional technologists. It is a rare person who has proven the ability to lead so important a design project to completion. Nathaniel has shown tremendous responsibility, skill, motivation and intellectual maturity at a very young age.