About Anna

Anna Young is the CEO and Co-Founder of MakerHealth, a company dedicated to bringing the spirit of the Maker Movement into healthcare. She fundamentally believes that everyday people, including patients and medical staff, can use their ingenuity and the right tools to create devices that heal. Anna’s work involves setting up makerspaces within hospitals, giving clinicians and patients access to prototyping tools like 3D printers and laser cutters. This setup is designed to improve the natural problem-solving skills of those closest to patient care, helping them develop customized and cost-effective solutions more quickly than traditional methods. She is also the Co-Founder of MakerNurse, a program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that specifically supports and champions the innovative ideas of frontline nurses. Her deep background in this field comes from her time as a researcher at MIT’s Little Devices Lab and as a lecturer in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. Anna and her team have a global history of success, including creating a health prototyping tool kit called MEDIKit. Her contributions to democratizing medical innovation have been widely recognized. In 2015, she was named a “Top Health Innovator Under 35” by LinkedIn, and in 2016, she was honored as one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business.” She continues to speak at major forums advocating for empowering medical personnel to become inventors.