Mason Wilde

When Mason Wilde was in high school — a few years before he came to the University of Kansas as a mechanical engineering major — he suffered a head injury during a football game. During his recuperation, a family friend from his hometown of Louisburg approached and asked for help on a project: Could Wilde help build a prosthetic hand for her 9-year-old son?

"A family friend approached us and said, 'We've been trying to get this project done. We've found this prosthetic hand design, but we don't know how to go about building it. People want a lot of money to build it,’" Wilde, now a sophomore, said recently.

A mechanical project might sound like a big task while recovering from a brain injury, but Wilde welcomed it as a distraction. "It was a nice thing I could look at for 10, 20 minutes at a time without stressing my brain too much,” he said.

The result — a $60 mechanical hand built for a family friend, young Matthew Shields — helped set Wilde on the path he’s on today: He started his own company to help create low-cost prosthetics using 3D printers, has a speaking slot Sunday, March 5, at the TedX UMKC conference and is scheduled to intern for Google this summer.

And all that’s built around his regular schedule of classes, research and other activities as a student and SELF Fellow in KU’s School of Engineering.

"My concussion specialist loved that I was making the best of a bad situation,” Wilde said, “doing something good."