Marlo Dreissigacker Kohn (BS ’05 Product Design, MS ’07 Mechanical Engineering) has been chosen to serve as Stanford University’s representative to Higher Education Makerspaces Initiative.
HEMI is a collaboration established by Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Georgia Tech, MIT, Olin College of Engineering, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale to tackle the formidable logistical and intellectual challenges of rethinking academic makerspaces. Stanford Product Realization Lab Directors David Beach and Kohn were among HEMI’s founders in 2016.
Kohn is the co-author, with John McMordie (BS ’15 , MS ’17, Mechanical Engineering), of the paper "Coaches and Their Impact: One Model for Empowering Teaching Assistants in an Academic Makerspace," which she presented at HEMI’s first International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM). At the most recent ISAM, Kohn moderated the keynote address given by Thomas Kalil, Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, and previously Deputy Director for Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama.
In an interview with Society of Women Engineers Magazine, Kohn described the ability to cross traditional “barriers” as a key feature of the maker movement: “It’s the maker mentality to move between processes and use different tools, even using traditional machines, in more flexible ways.”
A former PRL student and Teaching Assistant, Kohn is currently a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, Associate Director of the Product Realization Lab, and spearheads the making@stanford Initiative. A dedicated maker herself, Kohn has created furniture, soft goods, consumer products, and holds several patents on medical devices.
