Angel Giuffria is a psychology student who juggles her job as a graduate assistant at the Alumni Association, auditioning and performing in movies as an actress and conducting research to complete her degree. If this is not amazing enough, Giuffria does all of these things while wearing a prosthetic arm.
Giuffria is a congenital amputee, meaning she was born without her left arm. Her condition left doctors baffled, unable to make more than an educated guess as to why she was born without an arm. Giuffria does not wonder about the cause of her condition; she sees such contemplation as a waste of time.
“My mom was older,” said Giuffria. “She was 36 when she had me, so they think it was possible that there wasn’t enough amniotic fluid, and that possibly my arm rubbed against the uterine wall, but they really don’t know, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to make my arm grow back, so it’s like ‘What happened to your arm?’ I’m like ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anymore.'”
Giuffria’s current prosthesis is called the Deka arm, and it was originally created for the use of veterans and military personnel who were injured in battle. Because it is still in prototype phase, the Deka arm is not yet available on the market. Giuffria is testing the arm’s functionality for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  
“[DARPA is] commissioned by the Department of Defense,” said Giuffria. “Anything cool that the military makes usually is made by DARPA. You’ll see it on NCIS and stuff like that, and they’ll go into the DARPA labs, and they’ll have like, ‘How to make military people invisible,’ and stuff like that, which on NCIS it’s all exaggerated, but they really do a lot of cool stuff. So, what happened was, after they started having a lot of people come back missing limbs. They needed to work on an upper limb prosthetic, and the reason for that is because upper limb prosthetics hadn’t changed much in 15 years.”
Giuffria’s previous prosthetics only allowed her to open and close her hand and rotate her wrist 360 degrees. Giuffria told an anecdote that portrays exactly how inconvenient her previous prosthetic arm could be.  
“The only thing they have right now is where a wrist can rotate 360 degrees. I have an arm that does that, and it is a little scary sometimes. I actually had it in the airport once, and the electrodes on the inside can interfere with each other if you don’t turn the arm off, and I heard it in my bag, and I’m like ‘Is that my arm?’… I usually wear my cosmetic [arm] to go through security and stuff like that because it’s just easier to get swabbed and stuff. So I open my bag in the middle of the airport, and my arm’s just spinning in a circle. I’m like ‘Oh God.’ I’m looking around, just like ‘How do I turn this off and take it out of my bag without everybody [noticing]?’ It was just horrible.”
The Deka arm allows much more freedom in mobility. The arm is controlled by sensors placed on Giuffria’s feet. Using her feet, Giuffria can cycle through six different grips that serve various functions. This new technology allows her to do things like turn a doorknob or bring food to her face, actions that many of us take for granted.
“I’ve never been able to bring my arm to my mouth, because I have what’s called a short residual limb,” said Giuffria. “My arm stops right here, pretty close after my elbow, and so my arm kind of gets in the way. So when I bend my arm, it kind of gets in the way of itself, so to be able to actually turn the wrist towards my face and touch my mouth. I’m like, ‘I can touch my mouth!’ I remember the first day I did it. I was so excited. I was pointing to my head; I scratched my head. It was just really cool to be able to do it with my left hand.”
Giuffria explained all of this with optimism and good humor. Despite her limitations as an amputee, Giuffria does not consider herself to be disabled.
“I don’t refer to myself as disabled,” said Giuffria. “I don’t like it… I’m not handicapped. I don’t have a handicap sticker. I don’t do handicap parking, as easy as it would be, and how everyone’s going ‘I can’t believe that you don’t do that,’ because I don’t want to be labeled like that. I feel like I can do everything that I want to do.”
Much of Giuffria’s psychology research is focused on stigma and attitudes towards amputees. Giuffria has personally encountered people making rude comments and staring at her because of her arm. She laughed as she recalled a recent experience with a group of men and their reaction to her arm.  
“I was running in my neighborhood, and I hear this truck full of guys roll up behind me, and they’re talking, saying probably something inappropriate. I know they’re about to hit on me, and I’m like ‘I don’t have my arm on. Let’s see how this goes.’ As soon as they get next to me, I didn’t even turn, but I literally could feel them notice that I had one arm. They didn’t know what to do. They just rolled up their window and drove away.”
In her experience, Giuffria realizes that a lot of people do not know how to respond to someone who is an amputee. Giuffria stresses that amputees are just like any other person and should be treated as such.
“Go up and talk to them, because I feel like that’s one of the main divides,” said Giuffria. “A lot of people just stare, or they feel uncomfortable. I know there are going to be those people who have had traumatic amputations, or have had an accident, or have had an injury, but you know what makes them feel worse? When you stare at them. You make it weird when you do stuff like that. You make them uncomfortable. You make them feel like an outsider.”
Though Giuffria has faced rude comments from others, she has never faced discrimination in finding a job. Giuffria has acted in several movies, usually while wearing her cosmetic arm, and was featured as an extra in the movie Green Lantern.
After the study is over, Giuffria will not be able to keep the arm. However, she is hoping to be able to buy the $500,000 prosthetic once it is available on the market.