Congratulations to Dr. Waleed Hassanein, CEO at TransMedics, for being named a finalist for the 2017 European Inventor Award Finalists.   Best of luck getting the top spot.

Dr. Waleed Hassanein is being honored for developing the Organ Care System (OCS), a technique for preserving human organs outside the body three times longer than traditional cold storage. Dr. Hassanein originally developed the technique to store human hearts at Georgetown University by focusing on using warm environments and surrounding the heart with nutrient-rich blood. Implemented clinically in 2007, OCS is now used for human lung and kidney storage as well.

The additional time that an organ remains viable due to OCS presents a significant breakthrough for transplants. With a longer duration of viability outside the human body, organs can now be transported further and doctors can now accurately assess the suitability of a new organ before re-implantation. Today, Dr. Hassanein is the CEO, President, and Director of TransMedics, the company he founded to commercialize the concept of “living organ transplants” for the improvement of clinical practice.

Bayard Design consultant Matthew De Remer is a co-inventor of the OCS Lung System with Dr. Hassanein.

If you’re in New York City this week check out the I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment show at the Parsons School of Design.   It will feature the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck! documentary featuring Bayard Design LLC consultant Matthew De Remer in a non-speaking role.

I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment explores the complex and sometimes-contradictory role that design has played from the mid-Twentieth Century, through second wave feminism, to present non-binary intersections in the pursuit of gender expression and equality for those who have uteruses, menstruate, and/or identify as women.

The exhibition features objects, interfaces, and clothing that have sought to enable those who have uteruses, menstruate, or embrace womanhood as independent and creative subjects in a material world largely designed by and for men but consumed by those who identify as women.

Design’s relationship with the individual and with societies is rarely uncomplicated. With the introduction of the contraceptive pill came the rise of laws designed to constrict reproductive rights for people with uteruses; for every breast pump that facilitates new parents’ choices about work and nutrition, there exists a poorly designed familial leave policy; and so many designs “for her,” even for very young girls, come with the baggage of implicit and explicit expectations about class, race, gender performance, labor, and sexuality.