Daniel McInnis is a Grade 11 student from Ottawa, ON who strongly believes that “as teens we should take that really good idea for a product or for an invention that we thought up during Math class and pursue it! With a little bit of time and effort, it’s possible to have a lot of fun at what you do, and if you can solve a problem and help people at the same time, you’ve done something that’s out of the normal misconception of who teenagers are and what they stand for. We can accomplish great things, we just need to put our ideas into action”.
Daniel participates actively in the St. Francis Xavier Catholic High School community. He was recently elected as one of 2 students to be Student Trustees next year in the Ottawa Catholic School Board. Him and the other Student Trustee will be attending regular school board meetings, representing student voice and the students’ needs for the over 40,000 students in their school board. He also is the captain of his school’s FIRST robotics team, that participates in the regional competition in Oshawa every year. Daniel is also a Core Leader for his school’s Leadership Camp which is coming up this fall. He is helping organizing a 3 day camp that’s all about coming together with your peers and accomplishing great things.
On his own time, he’s got a got a couple of ventures on the go. Being extremely passionate about design and innovation, he has presented 2 projects at the Canada-Wide Science Fair (2011 and 2014) and is now pursuing them as businesses. In 2011, he designed a helmet that reduces the risk of getting a concussion in hockey and football. His helmet better addresses linear and rotational impacts when compared to any of the other competitors on the market today. This won him the Platinum Award for Best Junior Project in Canada. The helmet design is now patented and he is currently looking at trying to close a licensing deal with a major sports equipment manufacturer. Also, he presented his low-cost 3D scanner at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Windsor, ON in 2014. After watching a documentary about the difficulty of obtaining low-cost functional prosthetics today, he built this scanner so that it is able to make inexpensive 3D printed prosthetic limbs very rapidly and it also identifies the correct deceased donor limb for a recipient amputee for transplant. He won the Manning Innovation Award and Best in Fair for presenting his practical solution to a problem that affects over 37 million amputees worldwide.
“Today we are equipped with so many different resources, that we can really create anything. It’s by connecting our passions with what is needed in the market, that we can create something pretty special” says McInnis.
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