Santa Rosa High grad at Cal Poly helps design, build bionic hands for 10-year-old burn victim

By the time he was a senior at Santa Rosa High School, Austin Conrad had dislocated his left shoulder 22 times. Before undergoing surgery to repair the shoulder, he looked for an alternative solution.

“Sometimes, surgeries fail,” said Conrad, now a fourth-year engineering student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. “If we just cut (the arm) off,” he wondered, “could I build a new one? What would it take to do that?”

Bionic arms, as it turned out, were “really hard,” he said with a laugh, “so I just went with the surgery.” But he did spend considerable time reading about prosthetics. “That’s just kind of how my brain works.”

A third-generation automobile mechanic and product of his high school’s visual fine arts program, Conrad always has been interested in making things. He describes his bedroom - the unfinished, detached garage of his family’s Penngrove home - as “a workshop with a bed.”

He is creative, resourceful and hardworking. To those traits, add what he calls his “dumb superpower”: the ability to function at a high level on little to no sleep. These qualities made Conrad, now 23, one of the most valuable members of a team of Cal Poly students who spent eight months, starting in October, designing and building a pair of bionic hands for a 10-year-old burn victim.

That boy, Julian Reynoso, was a passenger in a minivan that was T-boned in Los Angeles by a drunk driver in April 2018. In addition to losing his father and two siblings, he suffered burns over 35% of his body. Julian’s mother, Elizabeth, also was seriously injured, but survived.

Julian’s case came to the attention of Quality of Life Plus, or QL+, a Cal Poly club whose members make specialized devices for people facing physical challenges. Julian presented unique difficulties. He had no fingers on his left hand, while parts of four digits remained on his right hand. Those different levels of disability required two different prosthetics, said Ryan Kissinger, the Cal Poly senior and team co-leader who postponed his graduation by a semester to devote himself to the project known as Hands For Julian.

Seventy students applied for the eight spots on the team. One of them, in particular, leapt out to Kissinger.

“Austin (Conrad) was incredibly charismatic, smart, and had this very strong energy about him,” Kissinger recalled. “He was exactly what we needed on the team.”

If no one in the club recognized Conrad, that’s because he’d spent the previous four years taking engineering courses at Santa Rosa Junior College. He always had the smarts for a four-year university, but lacked the financial resources.

Money was often tight for his family, which in the span of three or four years lost two houses in Sonoma County plus a business to bankruptcy. When he was in junior high, his mother, Colleen Conrad, recalled students were told they needed computers for schoolwork. With his parents unable to afford a laptop, Austin Conrad went to school early, or stayed late, to use the school’s computers.

“Finances were pretty tough for as long as I can remember,” said Conrad, who has worked in his family’s automotive shop, for a catering company, as an art instructor and tutor in a math lab, to name a few of the jobs he’s held since he was 12. “It was all about survival. If you wanted anything extra, you went out and worked for it,” he said.

After pulling straight A’s in junior college, he arrived at Cal Poly in September 2018 as a third-year student. Strolling on campus early in his first quarter, he offered a helping hand to another student who was walking by carrying lab equipment. After accepting, that undergraduate asked him, “Hey, did you go to Penngrove?”

Harry Koos, a graduate of Casa Grande High School, hadn’t seen Conrad since they attended Penngrove Elementary School together a decade earlier. They got to talking. Koos, the president of QL+, was on his way to a meeting to showcase the club to new students.

After joining the club, Conrad was chosen as design team leader for the Hands For Julian project, which turned into basically a full-time job. As Koos recalled, “I’d walk past the lab at 7 a.m. and see Austin in there, working with those little fingers.”

Considering all Julian had lost in the tragic car accident, Conrad said, “You couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll do this part-time.’?”

While she went out of her way to credit every member of the team, Elizabeth Reynoso said in an email that Conrad and Kissinger, in particular, had “connected” with her son on a level beyond his injuries. She recalled how Conrad would “step away from the project and take the time to check in on me. He has been compassionate, respectful, empathetic, and understanding to my journey.”

The team overcame numerous hurdles. After taking molds of Julian’s hands in the fall, they brought two prosthetics to his home for him to try on in April.

“When we saw him six weeks ago, his hands had healed immensely,” said Conrad, “which was great, but that meant his hands had shrunk” - much of the swelling had gone down - “and changed shape.” One of the prosthetics “flat out didn’t fit. It actually failed the first time around.”

Deadline for completion was June 8 - the evening of the QL+ presentation banquet. A few weeks earlier, Reynoso had assured the team that even if the prosthetics didn’t work, their efforts had “meant everything” to her and Julian.

The team, of course, wasn’t going to be content with a near miss. “It had to work,” Conrad said, “a hundred percent.”

It worked because Conrad was “an unrelenting force,” said another team member, Craig Icban.

Kissinger agreed, saying, “He’s the reason we were able to push as far as we did on the project.”

Allotted eight months, the team used virtually every hour. On the eve of last week’s banquet, all eight members were in the lab until 3 a.m., before some were able to go home. After some last-minute soldering at 7 a.m., team member Christian Aguirre completed the wiring harness on the left hand.

The moment of truth had arrived. “Christian pushed a button,” Conrad recalled, “and the wrong finger moved.” He pushed another button, “and two fingers that weren’t even attached started moving.”

After 75 minutes of debugging, they tried again. This time, it worked perfectly. “There was elation,” Conrad said, “followed by a few tears.”

Later that afternoon, Julian sat on a bench outside Cal Poly’s Advanced Technology Laboratories. After putting on his new hands, he used the right prosthetic to flip a toggle switch on the left hand. Then he started moving his new fingers. The boy smiled. The team roared.

Said Conrad, “It made eight months of work absolutely worth it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88.