Tahira Reid Smith

Tahira Reid Smith was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents. In the third grade, she sketched an idea for a machine that could automatically turn Double Dutch jump ropes, so she could practise without needing two other people — a design that won first place in a school drawing competition.

She carried that childhood idea to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she earned her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 2000. As an undergraduate, she took an introductory engineering design course taught by Professor Burt Swersey, a fellow Bronx native who became her mentor and, later, her co-inventor. Under his guidance, she revisited her third-grade sketch and, by graduation, had built a working prototype of an automated Double Dutch jump-rope machine, for which she was awarded two patents.

Reid Smith went on to complete a master's degree in mechanical engineering at RPI in 2004, and a Ph.D. in Design Science from the University of Michigan in 2010, focusing on product design, decision-making, and the psychology of design. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Iowa State University, she joined the faculty of Purdue University in 2012, where she founded the Research in Engineering and Interdisciplinary Design (REID) Lab and, over eleven years there, became the first Black woman to earn tenure in Purdue's Mechanical Engineering department.

She later moved to Pennsylvania State University as the Arthur L. Glenn Professor of Engineering Education and inaugural Associate Department Head for Inclusive Research and Education. Her Double Dutch machine has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and demonstrated on NBC's Today Show, and she has since founded Jump Dreams, Inc. to bring the invention to schools, gyms, and community organisations.