Background and career
Dean Lawrence Kamen (; born April 5, 1951) is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT, as well as founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. Kamen holds over 1,000 patents.
Dean Lawrence Kamen was born on April 5, 1951, on Long Island, New York, to Jack Kamen and Evelyn Kamen (born Rothenberg). The Kamen family is Jewish. His father was an illustrator for Mad, Weird Science, and other EC Comics publications. During his teenage years, Kamen was already being paid for his ideas; local bands and museums paid him to build light and sound systems. His annual earnings reached $60,000 before his high school graduation. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but dropped out in 1976 before graduating, after five years of private advanced research for the insulin pump AutoSyringe.
Kamen is known best for inventing the product that eventually became known as the Segway PT, an electric, self-balancing human transporter with a computer-controlled gyroscopic stabilization and control system. The device is balanced on two parallel wheels and is controlled by moving body weight. The machine's development was the object of much speculation and hype after segments of a book quoting Steve Jobs and other notable information technology visionaries espousing its society-revolutionizing potential were leaked in December 2001. Kamen was already a successful inventor: his company Auto Syringe manufactures and markets the first drug infusion pump. His company DEKA also holds patents for the technology used in portable dialysis machines, an insulin pump (based on the drug infusion pump technology), and an all-terrain electric wheelchair known as the iBOT, using many of the same gyroscopic balancing technologies that later made their way into the Segway.
Kamen has worked extensively on a project involving Stirling engine designs, attempting to create two machines: one that would generate power, and the Slingshot that would serve as a water purification system. He hopes the project will help improve living standards in developing countries. Kamen has a patent on his water purifier, and other patents pending. In 2014, the film SlingShot was released, detailing Kamen's quest to use his vapor compression distiller to fix the world's water crisis. Kamen is also the co-inventor of a compressed air device that would launch a human into the air in order to quickly launch SWAT teams or other emergency workers to the roofs of tall, inaccessible buildings. In 2009, Kamen stated that his company DEKA was now working on solar powered inventions. Later, Kamen and DEKA developed the DEKA Arm System or "Luke", a prosthetic arm replacement that offers its user much more fine motor control than traditional prosthetic limbs. It was approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May 2014, and DEKA is looking for partners to mass-produce the prosthesis.
In 1989, Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization intended to build students' interests in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In 1992, working with MIT Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers, Kamen created the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which evolved into an international competition that by 2020 had drawn 3,647 teams and more than 91,000 students. FIRST organizes robotics competition leagues for students in grades K-12, including FIRST LEGO League Discover for ages 4–6, FIRST LEGO League Explore for younger elementary school students, FIRST LEGO League Challenge for older elementary school and middle school students, FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) for middle and high school students, and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) for high school students. In 2010, Kamen called FIRST the invention he is most proud of, and said that 1 million students had taken part in the contests. On January 31, 2026, Kamen was put on a leave of absence due to his ties with Jeffrey Epstein, and on March 11 he voluntarily resigned from the FIRST Board of Directors and withdrew from all FIRST activities.
In 2017, Kamen founded the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute along with McCoy Mathies (ARMI) and launched BioFabUSA, a Manufacturing USA Innovation Institute with an $80 million grant from the Department of Defense. BioFabUSA's mission is to "...make practical the large-scale manufacturing of engineered tissues and tissue-related technologies, to benefit existing industries and grow new ones". In addition to DoD funding, Kamen brought together a consortium of private sector entities to form a public-private partnership which pledged $214M additional private dollars. In early 2020, ARMI was awarded a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to establish the first Foundry for American Biotechnology, known as NextFab "to produce technological solutions that help the United States protect against and respond to health security threats, enhance daily medical care, and add to the U.S. bioeconomy".
