Sandi DeRuntz

Sandi DeRuntz started college in Virginia, but she left to care for her growing family.

In 2014, she moved back to Massachusetts to be closer to her parents. She worked in insurance and performed stand-up comedy.

Then early in the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her two children lost their home to a fire in their apartment complex. Within a year, she lost her best friend to suicide. Suddenly, nothing seemed funny anymore.

“She had really, really wanted me to go to school,” DeRuntz says of her best friend.

So, within a few weeks, DeRuntz, who now lives in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, enrolled in online classes at Central Virginia Community College, where she had previously studied. The school was very accommodating and supportive.

“Especially when I was grieving, it seemed like the easiest way to go back to school,” she says.

She took every psychology class she could, hoping to better understand the symptoms and causes of suicidal depression. Next, she transferred to UMass Lowell as a psychology major, with the goal of becoming a disability rights lawyer for people with both mental and physical conditions. DeRuntz herself has systemic lupus, a chronic autoimmune disorder, and must often use a walker.

But a funny thing happened on the way to her degree. DeRuntz’s psychology coursework was emotionally intense, and she decided that she needed a class “just for me.” Her mother is an artist, and DeRuntz had grown up making art herself, starting with painting and moving into multimedia.

She signed up for Sculpture I with Assoc. Prof. Yuko Oda– and loved it so much that she decided to take every class that Oda taught. She also switched her major to liberal arts, which allowed her to combine a concentration in psychology with a concentration in studio art and a minor in disability studies.

In fall 2023, she signed up for a brand-new seminar, Adaptive Devices for Better Life, co-taught by Oda with faculty in physical therapy and mechanical engineering. In the class, students work in teams to solve practical problems for real people with disabilities.

After hearing from a man about the difficulties he had dressing himself after suffering a stroke and losing the use of one arm, DeRuntz came up with the idea for ZipperBuddy, an adaptive device that, when it is installed on a piece of clothing, allows people to close it up with one hand. She persuaded her teammates to adopt the idea.

As part of the class, all of the teams entered the fall 2023 Francis College of Engineering Prototyping Competition, one of several hosted by the Rist DifferenceMaker Institute. Team ZipperBuddy took first place, winning $2,500 for further product development.

The following semester, DeRuntz and a different student, a business major, won the $4,000 Contribution to a Healthier Lifestyle Award for ZipperBuddy in the DifferenceMaker Spring Idea Challenge. She also won a $5,000 in-kind award for legal services.

DeRuntz, 36, now has a provisional patent on ZipperBuddy and is in talks with companies about manufacturing it.

She says her personal experiences of physical limitations, her coursework in psychology, art and disability studies, and her performance experience all helped her to design and promote ZipperBuddy. And the DifferenceMaker program gave her the business skills, financial support and contacts she needs to bring it to market.

“I’ve found my purpose: I want to create accessible devices and get them to whoever needs them, to give people independence and freedom,” she says. “I feel very confident in saying I finally know what I want to be when I grow up.”