Five years after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Matt Knoespel and Phil Terrien are co-founders and the engineering backbone of a medical device company that’s collected a slew of awards since spinning out of a biomedical engineering design project.
Atrility Medical is also filling a crucial need in postoperative care for newborns with serious heart defects and starting to establish itself in children’s hospitals around the country.
If the two Green Bay, Wisconsin natives are being honest, though, all that success has emerged from a design assignment that wasn’t even their first choice.
Each semester in the BME design program, student teams select client projects to pour themselves into for three months. After missing out on their preferred option, Knoespel, Terrien and their groupmates reluctantly grabbed what would turn into the company’s AtriAmp device from the list of assignments that hadn’t yet been claimed.
“It turned out to be a life-changing selection that was thrust upon us, to some degree,” says Knoespel, who, like Terrien, earned his BME bachelor’s degree in 2017. “When doors close, new ones open, and sometimes you don’t expect that.”
Along with three classmates, they quickly shook off their disappointment, dove into learning about the heart, and set to work creating a prototype of a device capable of both passing on cardiac signals to a bedside monitor and interfacing with an external pacemaker. Their creation won the Tong Biomedical Design Award, the top prize in the BME design program each year, and the first in a series of honors the device-turned-company has collected over the past six years. In October 2022, Atrility received a Wisconsin Innovation Award (one of three companies with roots in the college to collect prizes).
Read full story at https://engineering.wisc.edu/news/biomedical-engineering-alums-find-rhythm-at-design-program-spinoff/