Unfolding Light: Solight Inventor and Founder Alice Min Soo Chun on the Girls That Create Podcast
Welcome to another episode of the Girls that Create podcast on Word of Mom Radio.In this episode, host Erin Prather Stafford sits down with Solight CEO Alice Min Soo Chun. Chun’s story is one of creativity, resilience, and a commitment to social entrepreneurship.
Listen to the full interview with Alice Min Soo Chun on Word of Mom Radio.
Chun was inspired to use her love for origami and her knowledge of solar energy to create the Solarpuff, an inflatable solar light. The device is collapsible and lightweight, making it practical for aiding disaster-stricken areas. Its design allows the Solarpuff to be easily transported and deployed in areas without electricity, providing much-needed light in times of crisis.
Chun also shares about her childhood, the inspiration for founding the Solight company, her thoughts on creativity, and her reflections on time spent in warzones delivering lights.
You can give light! Solight’s Give a Light program let’s supporters donate lights to different areas in need.
About Alice Min Soo Chun
As a little girl growing up in Seoul, Korea and then upstate New York, Chun spent many days learning how a simple fold can become structured. Origami forms were taught to her by her mother, who also taught Chun how to sew her own clothes.
Always creative, fascinated by design, structure and forms, Chun studied architecture at Penn State where she obtained her undergraduate degree and went on to earn her Masters in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
With emerging trends in material technology resulting in smarter, lighter, faster, sustainable fabrication, Chun started to sew solar panels to fabric as early experiments for harnessing solar energy with softer, malleable material. She became focused on solar technology and finding ways to create clean energy solutions upon learning her son Quinn was diagnosed with asthma.
While teaching as a Professor in Architecture and Material Technology at Columbia University, Chun created early prototypes of solar lights with her students. Still not satisfied, and fueled by her passion for helping the underserved, Chun invented the world’s only self-inflatable, portable solar light, eliminating the need for a mouth nozzle. This ensured a healthy, sanitary method to inflate. She named this invention the SolarPuff and conducted three years of field testing in Haiti.
In 2015 Chun launched Solight Design and initiated a KickStarter program with unprecedented results. She went on to win numerous awards including the US Patent Award for Humanity and her products have been exhibited at MOMA, the Modern Museum of Art in New York City.
Chun is an author, TedX speaker, and female inventor of Solight-Design and SEEU95.
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