Van Phillips (inventor)

Van Phillips (b. 1954) is an American inventor of prosthetics, he is know for the Flex-Foot brand of artificial foot and limbs that he created, and for his charity work for amputees.

An amputee himself, having lost a leg below the knee at age 21, Phillips was motivated by the limitations of then-existing artificial limbs to attend the Northwestern University Medical School Prosthetic-Orthotic Center. After graduation, he worked as a biomedical design engineer at the University of Utah before starting his own company, Flex-Foot Incorporated.

Phillips ultimately created an artificial foot made from carbon graphite. Unlike all previous prostheses, it stored kinetic energy, like a spring, from the wearers steps as potential energy, allowing the wearer to run and jump.

A prosthetic foot that he created, the Flex-Foot Cheetah, is used by double-amputee and Paralympics gold-medalist Oscar Pistorius, and about 90 percent of Paralympics participants use a variation of the original Flex-Foot design, as well as thousands of people around the world.

In 1999 he established Second Wind, a non-profit organization to provide inexpensive and resistant prostheses to amputees around the world, and is now working to create a prosthetic leg for land mine victims in developing countries.

He sold Flex-Foot to Ossur in 2000, who continues to manufacture the artificial foot.

In 1998 he received the Brian Blatchford Memorial Prize from the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics.