2026 Alumni Medalist Award

Greg Bixler ’03, ’07 MS, ’13 PhD thought he had his future mapped out. At 26, he loved his engineering job at Battelle and expected to spend his career there.

Then a church mission trip to central Asia changed his life.

“It was the first time I’d seen extreme poverty up close, but I was struck by people’s ingenuity,” Bixler says. “I remember seeing a retaining wall made from the body of an old car. People didn’t have concrete blocks, so they built with what they had. It made me think: if they can do this with so little, what can engineers do for the billions of people living in poverty?”

That question led Bixler to leave his corporate career and co-found Design Outreach, a humanitarian engineering nonprofit based in Gahanna, in 2013. As CEO, Bixler leads a team of engineers, development experts and volunteers who create practical technologies that save lives and strengthen communities.

Design Outreach works in 17 countries, primarily in Africa, and it has impacted more than one million people, Bixler says.

“We started with the biggest problem: contaminated water,” he says. “Billions of people suffer from it every day. The water pumps used in rural communities often break within months and force people back to disease-ridden ponds and streams.”

In response, Design Outreach developed the LifePump^TM, a hand pump engineered to last for years instead of months. The organization has installed over 600 LifePumps, providing clean water to about 500,000 people.

“What people need isn’t just a water pump,” Bixler says. “They need the assurance they’ll have water tomorrow. That’s what creates hope.” More recently, his team created the MaxLife^TM Centralizer, a replacement component that costs a few dollars and can extend a traditional water pump’s lifespan by years.

“It’s just one blue piece of injection-molded plastic, but I tell people, ‘This piece of plastic is going to change the world,’” Bixler says.

Design Outreach also is addressing medical-technology challenges. It developed a gravity-powered device to treat wounds in clinics without reliable electricity. Hospitals in Kenya and Malawi are evaluating the technology as Design Outreach works toward FDA approval.

Bixler says Ohio State guided his journey, with mentors supporting his interest in humanitarian engineering and connecting him with service-learning projects in Honduras, Guatemala and Ghana during his PhD. He has remained closely tied to the university, teaching a course for the past decade on appropriate technologies for developing countries and inspiring students to use engineering to improve lives worldwide.