Marcin Jakubowski is a Polish-American who came to the U.S. from Poland as a child. He graduated with honors from Princeton and earned his Ph.D. in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin. Frustrated with the lack of relevance to pressing world issues in his education, he founded Open Source Ecology in 2003 in order to make closed-loop manufacturing a reality. He began development on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)—an open source tool set of 50 industrial machines necessary to create a small civilization with modern comforts—and started a Kickstarter campaign in order to acquire funding. His work has recently been recognized as a 2012 TED Senior Fellow, as a 2013 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2012.