iHub University Innovation Champion, General Motors Company
Will Dickson is the University Champion for iHub within General Motors (GM). iHub is the catalyst for transformational innovation at GM. iHub empowers and unleashes the creativity of GM employees through a combination of crowdsourcing and collaboration, incubating ideas from napkin sketches into experience demonstrators. The focus of iHub is to deliver transformative solutions to complex problems.
Dickson joined GM in 2015 as a Hardware-in-the-Loop Engineer, learning extensively about vehicle dynamics systems. In 2016, he was named Assistant Program Engineering Manager for GM’s next generation of trucks, where he gained valuable insight into the “nuts and bolts” of how to take an immensely complex product from design to production. In his current role as the University Champion for iHub, Dickson works collaboratively with university ecosystems to connect passionate problem solvers to real-world problems in industry.
Dickson earned a Bachelor’s of Science in Materials Sciences and Engineering from MIT in 2014 and a Master of Engineering in Materials Sciences and Engineering from University of California,
Berkeley in 2015. At MIT, he was a member of the varsity basketball team from 2010-2012; did undergraduate research in the Laboratory for Bio-inspired Interfaces (Holten-Andersen); taught
and developed courseware for 3.091x on edX.org, a publicly available class for MIT’s freshman solid-state chemistry class; and worked in Spain via MIT’s international educational program,
MISTI, in a university materials laboratory.
Dickson is passionate about exploring new technologies, teaching, and innovation. He was recently named as a distinguished engineer in GM’s entry-level rotational program, TRACK (Technical Rotation and Career Knowledge). Less than two years into his career, he filed his first patent at GM in 2017.