EDUCATION: Joseph Klaesner | Associate Professor Of Physical Therapy, Washington University School Of Medicine

When Joseph Klaesner started out in the mid-1980s, he couldn’t get a biomedical engineering job. Fast-forward 30 years, and the world has caught up with him. For the past 15 years, he’s been shaping some of the best minds in the field. In the senior-level BME design class he teaches along with Dr. Frank Yin and Jonathan Silva at Washington University, recent projects have varied from a pedicle screw device that helps identify the real-time position of surgical tools to a hot pink robotic prosthetic arm for a 13-year-old girl, made with a 3-D printer for only $200. “All of these students are exposed to incredible new technology,” Klaesner explains. “The ones that are successful are the ones that look at the technology in new ways.” And Klaesner knows how hard they need to work firsthand: His own research centers on rehab engineering and the WheelMill System, a wheelchair dynamometer that provides a realistic user experience for manual wheelchair research and training