Fellow:Mary Dwyer

My name is Mary Dwyer, and I am a mechanical engineering sophomore at The Cooper Union.

My personal and professional interests involve designing decentralized ecosystems that address existing healthcare and legal identity problems as a means to protect and empower individuals. I am focused on learning about and educating my peers on cryptographic systems and blockchain technology to efficiently approach these global issues.

The UIF Team's main project is the Winter Intensive, but my personal project as a fellow is called "Building Blocks." Building Blocks is a year-long project intensive in which art, architecture, and engineering students work together for Consensus Systems to build a blockchain-based application. Intrinsic in every professional project is collaboration between disciplines. Blockchains can be compared to the Internet, which requires user interface and user experience design as well as full-stack development to produce a service with which humans can interact.

I first joined the Cooper community as a senior in high school to participate in Invention Factory, an intensive Cooper Union accelerator program. The selective program guides 20 students through a rigorous process of invention: Participants conceive of and prototype inventions, present their inventions each week to guest evaluators, file a provisional patent application and participate in a competition at which a panel of distinguished designers, inventors, engineers and patent attorneys choose the best inventions. Anushree Sreedhar and I won second place for our invention of the SEAL fire extingusiher, and have since been named MIT-Lemelson Finalists, Collegiate Inventor Competition Finalists, and a Venturewell E Team.

Last year, as a freshman, the relationships I developed with the student body enabled me to try and truly enjoy an electrical engineering course that informed the cryptographic research I did at my summer internship, play college basketball with girls I now call my best friends, and get involved in school politics in a way that empowered me and all of my classmates to work together to impact administrative decisions. I want to continue to collaborate with my classmates to improve our institution and perpetuate the ideals of Peter Cooper.

Winter Intensive at Cooper Union Proposal: https://goo.gl/kDN2lm