Imagine a world where amputees can walk, run, and even dance with the same ease and grace as those with natural limbs. For over a decade, Tommaso Lenzi, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been working tirelessly to make this vision a reality through his groundbreaking research on robotic prosthetic legs. “Prosthetics is a fascinating field because it gives me the chance to help people regain their independence,” Lenzi says. “I’ve always been driven by the potential to make a real difference in people’s lives.”

With funding from the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, Lenzi has developed a robotic prosthesis that amputees can intuitively control, just by thinking about the movement, thanks to sensors on the user’s muscles. This enables them to walk up stairs, cross obstacles, squat, and lunge—activities difficult or impossible with current prostheses.

Last year, the Utah Bionic Leg was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions, a success Lenzi attributes to the U’s culture of innovation and collaboration with graduate students, the VA, and local hospitals. “The university environment fosters ingenuity so researchers can envision a future where disabilities are no longer a barrier,” Lenzi emphasizes. He’s now focused on demonstrating the significant advantages of the robotic prosthesis over current options. Ottobock, a world leader in prosthetics and orthotics, has licensed the technology from the U and aims to bring this novel prosthesis to amputees worldwide.

Lenzi’s work builds upon the U’s legacy of advancing prosthesis technology. Engineers at the U have also created the “Luke Skywalker” arm and a brain-computer interface called the Utah Electrode Array.

Ed Catmull BS’69 PhD’74 made us believe toys could talk. But before Woody and Buzz Lightyear came to be, Catmull and Jim Clark PhD’74, working under computer science department founder David Evans BS’49 PhD’53, created the Catmull-Rom splines, a program that fused 3D realism to 2D computer graphics and opened the world’s eyes to the power of computer animation. 

While earning his doctorate, Catmull made Computer Animated Hand, a one-minute animated version of his left appendage. The film intrigued George Lucas, who in 1979 asked Catmull to create a digital model of a Star Wars X-wing fighter. Lucas then named him vice president of Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas’ computer graphics division.

Catmull later co-founded Pixar and was one of the driving forces behind Toy Story. Clark took the entrepreneurial route after graduation, founding several Silicon Valley companies, including Silicon Graphics and Netscape (famous for the popular web browser that later spawned Firefox). Computer Animated Hand was inducted into the National Film Registry. Library of Congress scholars wrote, “In creating the film, Catmull worked out concepts that [became] the foundation for computer graphics.” 

Tea ignited more than one revolt. The Boston Tea Party sparked an uprising that led to the American Revolution. And a simple department store teapot helped the U’s fledgling computer science department revolutionize the computer graphics industry.

While working on his doctorate, Martin Newell PhD’75 was looking for a simple object to use as a template for future computer graphics models. His wife suggested using their tea set, as they were sitting down for a cup. He sketched their teapot by hand.

The teapot, chosen for its geometric simplicity and recognizability, has since become a beloved symbol within the computer graphics community, representing the innovative spirit that heralded the technical evolution of CG.

Newell founded Ashlar, a computer-aided design software company, in 1988. In 2007, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer-graphics modeling, rendering, and printing. He recently retired as an Adobe Fellow at Adobe Systems.

And that revolutionary teapot? It’s enshrined at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where it sits among a collection of objects including the Apple-1 and the first Radio Shack catalog.

Speaking of Adobe Systems, John Warnock BS’61 MS’64 PhD’69, who passed away last year, co-founded the pioneering software firm in 1982 and was CEO of the company until he retired in 2010. But that’s not the only reason he left an indelible mark on the computer industry.

While at Adobe, Warnock helped develop PostScript, Illustrator, and the PDF format, a way to keep a document’s original integrity, no matter where or how it’s opened. “The thing I really enjoy is the invention process,” Warnock was quoted as saying in a 2023 New York Times article that marked his passing. “I enjoy figuring out how to do things other people don’t know how to do.” He also has “the dubious distinction of having written the shortest doctoral thesis in University of Utah history,” he told Continuum magazine in 2013. His 1969 thesis described a method to render solid objects at a time when most computer renderings were only line drawings.

U researchers have discovered 50 genes involved in inherited disease risk. And the list keeps growing. In 1991, U geneticist Mark Skolnick helped build the Utah Genealogy Resource (now known as the Utah Population Database) and co-founded Myriad Genetics with Peter Meldrum BS’70 MBA’74 to search for cancer susceptibility genes. The team they led, which included Myriad scientists and U genetic epidemiologists like Lisa Cannon-Albright MS’82 PhD’88, successfully located the major cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1, BRCA2, and CDKN2A, and Myriad later introduced the first genetic tests for mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 to assess risk of hereditary breast cancer.

Today, Myriad has more than 2,600 employees and has performed more than a million genetic tests for hereditary cancers, reproductive health, mental health, and other diseases. Meanwhile, Ray White, who would later be named founding director of Huntsman Cancer Institute, began to create a genetic linkage map of the human genome. White’s findings: carriers of a mutation of the APC gene—which encodes a protein that acts as a tumor suppressor and regulates cell growth—have a nearly 100 percent chance of developing colon cancer. Later, U researchers were able to trace a specific APC mutation all the way back to a Pilgrim couple who arrived in America in the 1630s.

Imagine the relief of a couple when they hear that a medical treatment could eradicate a potential genetic defect that one parent might pass to their children. That type of breakthrough, once the realm of science fiction writers, is now a future possibility, thanks to research done by Mario Capecchi, Distinguished Professor of human genetics and biology at the U. In 2007, Capecchi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing a technique to selectively disable genes in mice. These “knockout mice” allow scientists to study the effects of specific genes by observing what happens when they’re “turned off.”

The work opened a new way to research genetics, and the novel gene-targeting technique Capecchi spearheaded is now widely used.

“I am a very gene-centric guy,” Capecchi said in a 2008 interview with the National Institutes of Health. “Not because genes do everything, but because genes are the easiest place to be able to dissect complex biological phenomena with great precision.”

The U has played a great role in keeping America safe—and in making sure you can read this article online. During the Cold War, military leaders feared a Russian nuclear strike could knock out a centralized location, thereby disabling American defense capabilities with one blow. This led to the creation in the late 1960s of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a computer communication network linking multiple spots across the country.

The University of Utah School of Computing was one of the first four hosts of this new system, joining this early version of the Internet in 1969 under the direction of computer science professor Ivan Sutherland. At its height, ARPANET had more than 230 linked computer stations in the United States. Improvements in defense communications led to ARPANET being decommissioned in 1990, but its progeny—the Internet—lives on.