¿ì»îÊÓƵcommunity members honored for innovation by The Daily Record

Towson University’s ARMStrokes project and rising senior Destiny Watford and her environmental activism organization Free Your Voice were named 2016 Innovators of the Year by The Daily Record.

By Megan Bradshaw on August 17, 2016

Towson University’s ARMStrokes project and rising senior Destiny Watford and her environmental activism organization Free Your Voice were named 2016 Innovators of the Year by The Daily Record.

ARMStrokes, an interdisciplinary research project conducted by TU’s Jess & Mildred Fisher College and Mathematics and the College of Health Professions, produced a smartphone app to assist stroke survivors with upper extremity exercises. The project was partially funded by TU’s School of Emerging Technologies and the Aetna Foundation. Fisher’s Heidi Feng and Ziying Tang and CHP’s Sonia Lawson were the faculty who headed up the project.

List of 2016 award winners
The 2016 Daily Record Innovator of the Year award list

Watford won the prestigious for her work with the action group to stop plans to develop the nation's largest incinerator in South Baltimore's Curtis Bay community—a community already plagued with higher-than-average respiratory disease cases. She started that work when she was just 17. She was also named as one of .

participated in the ¿ì»îÊÓƵIncubator, learning how to turn their educational startup into a viable business and how to plan for future iterations of the apps they’ve created to help kids and teens grasp the meaning of complex words. The ¿ì»îÊÓƵIncubator serves as an entrepreneurial resource and activity hub in and outside Towson University.

¿ì»îÊÓƵalso contributed to Light City Baltimore, the first large-scale, international light festival in the United States. College of Fine Arts and Communication faculty Jenn Figg, Matthew McCormack, Lynn Tomlinson and Jay Hertzog contributed to three installations, while eight undergraduate students and six alumni assisted with the event as a whole.

The 2016 Innovator of the Year awards will be presented Oct. 13 at a reception/dinner starting at 5:30 p.m. at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Highway in Baltimore. Winners will be profiled in a special magazine that will be inserted into the Oct. 14 issue of The Daily Record and .

The Daily Record began the Innovator of the Year awards in 2002 as a way to recognize Marylanders and Maryland-based companies for their innovative spirit – for creating new products, new programs, new services or new processes that have helped their companies, industries or communities.