Katelyn Toth and her stepbrother were riding a paddleboat on a small lake near Bremen, Indiana, in 2006 when a storm whipped out of nowhere and unleashed a lightning bolt, the lone strike in a 60-mile radius.

While her stepbrother suffered only a slight shock, Katelyn took the full force of the sudden strike. Lightning bolts can be so powerful they vaporize the sap in a tree and cause a steam explosion that blows apart the trunk. Katelyn suffered third-degree burns across her face, neck and torso.

The 12-year-old – who loved softball, played the clarinet, rescued earthworms on the driveway after rainstorms, and once brought 27 frogs home to her basement – was not expected to live. She was airlifted to two different hospitals. She lingered in a coma-like state for months, her brain severely shocked. Doctors at a special burn unit in Kalamazoo, Michigan, told her mother, Julie Noblitt, that Katelyn would never walk or talk again.

“She brings a lot of light when we go places”

A year later, Katelyn returned to the burn unit in Kalamazoo and walked through the door with only the help of a walker. The male nurse who’d been most involved in her treatment broke down in tears. But Katelyn and her mother are too focused on recovery for self-pity.

“She brings a lot of light when we go places,” Julie says of her daughter. “I call it her light. It’s an aura, how she projects energy. Her determination. It just draws people to her and makes them smile.”

A group of Notre Dame engineering students, drawn to Katelyn’s light, spent this semester experimenting on how to help her with another step in her recovery: eating on her own. Now 22 years old, she has control of her arms when held close to her torso, but when she extends them, ongoing nerve damage causes tremors that make controlling a fork or spoon nearly impossible.

“When we eat out at a restaurant, I’ve seen her turn away from the other people there so they can’t see her being fed and eating,” Julie said. “It breaks my heart. This project is about self-esteem, giving her the control to eat on her own.”