CEO, Engineer, Scientist

When Dr. Aadeel Akhtar was 7 years old, he met someone with a limb difference for the first time. She was his age, living in poverty in Pakistan, missing her right leg. At the time, he wondered how they could share the same ethnic heritage but have such vastly different qualities of life. As he grew older, he realized that this was due to a lack of resources. For that reason, he founded and serves as the CEO of PSYONIC, a company whose mission is to develop advanced prostheses that are affordable for everyone. PSYONIC's first product is the Ability Hand--a prosthetic hand that moves all five fingers, is the fastest available, is impact resistant, and gives users a feeling of touch.

Dr. Akhtar received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016. He received a B.S. in Biology in 2007 and M.S. in Computer Science in 2008 at Loyola University Chicago. His research is on motor control and sensory feedback for upper limb prostheses, and he has collaborations with the Bretl Research Group at Illinois, the Center for Bionic Medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, the John Rogers Research Group at Northwestern University, and the Range of Motion Project in Guatemala and Ecuador. In 2021, he was named as one of MIT Technology Review’s top 35 Innovators Under 35 and America’s Top 50 Disruptors in Newsweek.