TU community members honored for innovation by The Daily Record

By Megan Bradshaw on August 17, 2016

Towson University’s ARMStrokes project and rising senior Destiny Watford and her environmental activism organization Free Your Voice were named 2016 Innovators of the Year by The Daily Record.

ARMStrokes, an interdisciplinary research project conducted by TU’s Jess & Mildred Fisher College and Mathematics and the College of Health Professions, produced a smartphone app to assist stroke survivors with upper extremity exercises. The project was partially funded by TU’s School of Emerging Technologies and the Aetna Foundation. Fisher’s Heidi Feng and Ziying Tang and CHP’s Sonia Lawson were the faculty who headed up the project.

Watford won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work with the Free Your Voice action group to stop plans to develop the nation's largest incinerator in South Baltimore's Curtis Bay community—a community already plagued with higher-than-average respiratory disease cases. She started that work when she was just 17. She was also named as one of Time’s 2016 Next Generation Leaders.

Communication APPtitude participated in the TU Incubator, learning how to turn their educational startup into a viable business and how to plan for future iterations of the apps they’ve created to help kids and teens grasp the meaning of complex words. The TU Incubator serves as an entrepreneurial resource and activity hub in and outside Towson University.

TU also contributed to Light City Baltimore, the first large-scale, international light festival in the United States. College of Fine Arts and Communication faculty Jenn Figg, Matthew McCormack, Lynn Tomlinson and Jay Hertzog contributed to three installations, while eight undergraduate students and six alumni assisted with the event as a whole.

The 2016 Innovator of the Year awards will be presented Oct. 13 at a reception/dinner starting at 5:30 p.m. at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Highway in Baltimore. Winners will be profiled in a special magazine that will be inserted into the Oct. 14 issue of The Daily Record and available online.

The Daily Record began the Innovator of the Year awards in 2002 as a way to recognize Marylanders and Maryland-based companies for their innovative spirit – for creating new products, new programs, new services or new processes that have helped their companies, industries or communities.