Frankie Flood

Last week, I attended a lecture given by Frankie Flood, an Assistant Professor at UWM who is responsible for engineering some of the most impressive work I’ve seen displayed in recent memory. Despite the complexity of his works, he didn’t go through much engineering during his time in school. During his presentation, he showed my class and I how he got started, what he started with, and what he was working on currently.

He began by introducing us to the pizza cutters he made by hand, which may not sound like much, but each individual slicer had so much going on in terms of parts, shape, and color that it drew me in almost immediately. He took us through the process of creating each one and even gave each one its own name (I was quite partial to Psycho Pizza Hot Rod…at least I think that was its name). Then he went on to talk about how he took inspiration from Hot Rods and their style as well as when he was contacted by a famous chef on the Food Network (who loved his designs so much, he got a tattoo of one of the early pizza cutters). Flood finished his presentation by introducing us to his latest project; 3D printed prosthetic. He and his team would create a 3D scan of the arms of children who were born without fully developed hands and build around the formation to create a full hand complete with fingers controlled through the movement of their arm, allowing them to do anything from writing to shaking hands with others. The evolution of his entire presentation was quite inspiring, especially since he took us from start to finish without skipping over a single detail.