Professor Joshua Pearce

Biography

Joshua M. Pearce received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He was the first Richard Witte Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a Professor cross-appointed in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Michigan Technological University where he inaugurated and was the faculty advisor for the Michigan Tech Open Source Hardware Enterprise. He was a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair and is a visiting professor of Photovoltaics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University as well as a visiting Professor Équipe de Recherche sur les Processus Innovatifs (ERPI), Université de Lorraine, France. He is currently the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. He runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing, but also includes policy and economics. His research is regularly covered by the international and national press. According to Elsevier’s citation metrics last year he was in the top 0.06% most cited scientists globally and is continually ranked in the top 0.1% for his accessible research on Academia.edu. He started the field of open hardware with publications in Science and Nature, edited the special issue on open hardware for the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and helped developed the United Nations Economic and Social Council and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development plan for open source hardware. He is the editor-in-chief of HardwareX, the first journal dedicated to open source scientific hardware. Finally, he wrote the first book on the subject: Open-Source Lab:How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs. He is also the author of the  Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects, and To Catch the Sun, an open source book of inspiring stories of communities coming together to harness their own solar energy, and how you can do it too!

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Panmure House Prize?

I am deeply honored to be shortlisted to win the Panmure House Prize. It is good to see Adam Smith’s philosophy is still influencing culture by the leadership from the Panmure House merging his insights from economics, ethics, and social theory and incentivizing academics to continue his work. It is particularly gratifying to be potentially among previous year’s winners like Prof. Doran at the University of Notre Dame, who studies how intellectual friendships drive innovation. If we are going to thrive in the long term, the sharing underlying these friendships is exactly what is needed and that is why Panmure House’s work is important.

How did you find out about the Panmure House Prize and what was it that attracted you to apply?

I found out about the Panmure House Prize due to a recommendation from Western University’s leadership team. Learning about the goals of the Panmure House Prize to encourage long-term thinking and aggressive innovation was particularly appealing to me as it is in direct agreement with my research focus of long term sustainability and the use of open source techniques to produce radical continuous innovation.  

Could you give us a brief introduction to your research for people who might not be from an academic background, could you explain what is the problem you are trying to solve?

Free and open source hardware consists of physical objects, like machines or devices, whose design information is publicly available, allowing anyone to study, modify, create, and distribute them. The design documents include electronic wiring diagrams, mechanical designs, and software – everything you would need to make a complete copy of a device. When we share open hardware using open source licenses, not only do we give everyone the freedom to immediately use our ideas, but they also come with a viral license that demands any improvements are re-shared with the same license. This is the advantage of open source development that is responsible for most of the software foundation like Linux that is responsible for the Internet and used by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies. The more useful the design you share,  the more people are likely to adopt it and start developing it. This creates synergy that drives rapid innovation for technology. In software design, the open source method is well known. I am bringing the same methods to hardware design.

For my research, I develop open source scientific hardware to help speed up and reduce costs for labs all over the world. My research uses open source electronics like open source Arduino microcontrollers and open source 3D printers that can make custom physical parts.  We drive economic development by releasing open source appropriate technology, which are easily and economically made from readily available resources by local communities to meet their needs.  We have shown distributed recycling and manufacturing are environmentally- and economically- superior to traditional centralized and proprietary systems. Open source hardware drives rapid innovation and gives researchers the freedom to control their technology, while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs. My research showed how both scientists and educators can radically cut costs while building superior scientific equipment and that in the long term this drives economic development. I think Adam Smith would have really liked the concept of open hardware because of the freedom of competition and cooperation it encourages. Using the open source development methodology has not only greatly helped my own technical research in many fields, but more importantly, it accelerates research to make it accessible to a much wider group of scientists that can then benefit us all from their discoveries.

How do you conduct your research?

I use an open source, highly collaborative methodology in my research. My group itself is very interdisciplinary – we have every engineering discipline represented in order to be able to develop open hardware, covering everything from software development, mechanical design, electrical design to manufacturing. As I want our work to have practical long term use, we also focus heavily on the economics of our hardware development. I share all my group’s literature reviews and methods before we do experiments. After we conduct experiments, we share the results, including open access papers or preprints, all of our designs, software and data with everyone. My group continues to develop dozens of open source tools for science and to address general needs in the population. This can save a lot – for example - just one of the devices we made (an open source syringe pump library), which was downloaded tens of thousands of times, saved the scientific community more than $20 million! We have a lot more projects on the go.  If you want to know what I am up to at any given moment, or to download any of our hundreds of free designs of everything from scientific tools to toys, see: https://www.appropedia.org/FAST

How do you envision your work will advance long-term thinking and innovation in your field and beyond?

My research group and I have had some really great success applying open hardware principles to technical problems focusing on scientific equipment and consumer goods. My work on distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware has shown particular promise among scientists for developing custom scientific tools. The growth of open hardware within academia has been rapid in the last decade and appears to be tracking the rise of free and open source software, being about 15-years behind. According to Google Scholar, there are now thousands of open source hardware articles. There are  millions of open hardware devices now, whereas when I wrote the first open hardware book there were only a few dozen tools. These devices are saving scientists money, which translates into more research and faster innovation.  In a review of the available literature, I found overwhelming evidence for a wide range of scientific tools, open hardware provides economic savings of 87% compared to equivalent or lesser proprietary tools. These economic savings increased to 94% for free and open source tools over commercial equivalents when open source electronics and 3D printing were used.  It is clear that open source development accelerates innovation, and that working together, we can work much faster. I hope that, in the long term, all devices are free and open source. Imagine a global catalog for every technology that you can customize, download and replicate for free. When distributed manufacturing matures to that point, we can all thrive!

What are you working on next?

There is an enormous need for low-cost, high-quality medical hardware, but deployment is complicated by regulations. Medical regulations are changing because the open distributed manufacturing paradigm saved money and lives during COVID-19 could be applied all the time.  We are working on several open source frugal biomedical devices and scientific hardware focused on medical questions. I just started a collaboration with two scientists that are assessing complex cognition in mouse models of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric conditions. Their approach substantially increases the validity of testing, which increases the likelihood that potential treatments that work in mice will also work in human patients.  Given that most treatments for neuro conditions fail at the (very expensive) clinical trials stage, despite having been demonstrated to work in preclinical mouse models using standard approaches, there is a huge unmet need for this kind of approach. Most of that need is based on the cost of the hardware, four mice testers cost $40,000, which makes the number of devices needed inaccessible to many researchers. Over the next year, I hope to develop a mouse tester that costs $1,000 or less to help speed finding some kind of cure for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.