Women of Distinction Awards

Inn-Inn Chen

Inn-Inn Chen is a senior biomedical engineering major at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She came to Georgia Tech to be an engineer as a first generation college student, and since that time she has take her passion, commitment, and dedication and has gone on to be an entrepreneur, researcher, and student leader.

Inn-Inn has influenced the lives of many through her involvement and leadership at Tech. She has been involved in diverse facets of Tech life, including the Biomedical Engineering Society, Honor Advisory Council, Technique, and the Georgia Tech Tennis Club. Furthermore, she has participated in the Presidents' Council Governing Board, where she eventually was elected as chair. While serving as chair, she successfully led this organization and helped it grow in breadth and depth. Under her leadership, they created new resources for student organizations, facilitated discussions with students and administration on an integrated online calendar, created the structure for an organizational consulting team, implemented and enhanced a conference for student organization leaders, and raised more funds for events and resources than any previous chair.

She has also influenced the lives of those outside of Tech. For two years, she served as the charter president of Engineering World Health (EWH), during which time the organization was selected as Best New Organization on Campus. As a member of EWH, she used her engineering skills to repair medical equipment for donation to developing world hospitals. Her commitment to this project was so great, that she traveled with a shipment to a San Salvador hospital for the summer. At this hospital, she worked to save premature infants by soldering desk staples into incubator covers. This is what led her to the realization that to be an engineer and save lives, she had to design new tools that better fit the needs of people. She further realized she needed to also know how to design the tools and how to meet the demands of the medical industry. She led a design team that worked on prototyping a low-cost solar refrigerator to store vaccines in hospitals with no reliable electrical power. This design was so successful it attracted venture capitalists at a business plan competition.