Camilo Toruño
'20 Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth College
Fostering Collaboration
Borrowing an example from my team’s capstone project, once I’d developed a mathematical model to solve the problem, I encouraged the other team members to contribute the knowledge they’d developed about each technology to the model. Individual members and I worked together to make sure the numbers we fed the model were consistent across technologies. I also taught another member who was particularly interested in the gory details of the model, and together we improved the model and checked the work I’d done.
Identifying and Filling Knowledge Gaps
In a term-long project my team and I set out to build a computer vision system for the blind. After proposing the initial idea, no one knew whether or how it could work. I broke the problem down into the necessary sub processes, and then identified who could help us determine whether they were feasible. First, I contacted two peers with experience in OpenCV, a computer vision package, and they taught me the basics that allowed me to develop the core software. I knew a major gap was electronics, so I reached out to Dartmouth experts to iron out what devices could control the tactile display. Lastly, I got the team in contact with a Stanford researcher whose TED Talk on sensory substitution inspired us, who then helped us vet the project.
About Me
Becoming an engineer has been a long and fruitful path. The journey began when I was nine years old and I became concerned with climate change. I spoke to my father, and he encouraged me to engineer solutions to the problem. I loved to build gadgets, and study how mechanical systems work, so it was a natural step forward.
My passion for engineering manifested itself in projects from rebuilding a vintage motorcycle, working on electro-mechanical control systems, and developing automated aeroponic agriculture, to genetic engineering tools to enable fuel production, and building biosensors for directed evolution. From computationally optimizing the Dartmouth energy system, to developing a computer vision system for the blind. My desire to make our society sustainable is the core that drives me to grow an ever broader and deeper set of skills.
