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What do the table you sit at, the packages you get in the mail, the building you live in, and lifesaving medical devices you see in hospitals have in common? All of them are created by people like Yamilée Toussaint, who studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In Toussaint’s words, “Most of the things that you lay your eyes on are things that a mechanical engineer designs.”
In her current position as the Founder and CEO of STEM from Dance, Toussaint practices a different kind of creation. Entrepreneurship, she says, is about building something from an idea.
Yamilée’s parents emigrated from Haiti. Her father supported his family as an engineer. Looking back, she believes that his success helped inspire her to become an engineer. He designed molds for plastics at a company called Leviton, which makes electrical devices. As a child, Yamilee watched her father create 3D models and heard him talking about the problems he faced in his jobs and the solutions he found. She recalls seeing firsthand the challenges of engineering and also the satisfactions of succeeding. Her father also started a nonprofit called Haitian Orphans Wish, which improves educational opportunities and sends clothing, school supplies, and other items to disadvantaged children living in Haiti.
Math was also an inspiration to Toussaint, who was often bored as a child in elementary school math classes due to their simplicity. Yamilée’s drive to learn math continued into high school. She enjoyed tests and succeeded in them. Her father told her that skill in math and science was very helpful in engineering, and so she continued to pursue those subjects, taking AP physics and calculus at Holy Trinity High School in Long Island.
Engineering always fascinated Toussaint, but in the beginning it was biomedical engineering, not mechanical, that appealed to her. She wanted to help people and especially loved the idea of using engineering to do so. So when she applied to college, her top choices were places like Duke and John Hopkins, because they were the best schools for biomedical engineering. But something also attracted her to MIT, a university that had no bioengineering program at the time.
Though Toussaint worried that she wouldn’t fit in with students at MIT, she found that they were normal and friendly people, many of whom shared an intense interest in science and also enjoyed relaxing and having fun. Toussaint joined the Black Students’ Union, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Caribbean Club and became co-chair of the Black Women’s Alliance. She told Math4Science that this and other leadership roles she assumed in her college community influenced the path she would later follow.
But before Toussaint could think about that path, she had to deal with the problem that had discouraged her from MIT from the start: its lack of a biomedical engineering program. She decided to choose mechanical engineering instead and stuck with it even after MIT began offering the major she had wanted all along.
Still, Toussaint did not abandon her interest in using engineering to save lives. She specialized in biological engineering, learning to create medical devices and implants. Fascinated by the possibility of creating mechanical solutions to the body’s natural problems, she became an intern at Johnson & Johnson, where Toussaint worked on systems that repair clogged arteries.
Stent delivery systems are like metallic parachutes designed to help blood flow through clogged arteries. (Blocked arteries can cause heart attack, stroke, or even death.) Before doctors use stents to save people’s lives, engineers design them and test them in labs. Toussaint and her colleagues used a humanoid robot to try out the stents. The robot was designed to apply the same resistance that a human body would to a surgeon installing the stent. Toussaint inserted the first part of the stent, a long tube, through the robot’s thigh, and move it to reach the clogged “artery.” Then, the stent’s fascinating ability would activate! At the end of the tube was a deflated balloon and a metal cage. When these reached the robot’s artery, Toussaint would inflate the balloon, causing the metal cage to expand and clearing and opening the artery.
After graduating from MIT, Toussaint joined Teach for America and taught algebra in East New York, Brooklyn. “I love getting students excited about math.” Confidence, she found, was a key ingredient to success in mathematics. “How,” she wondered, “did I get enough confidence to make it through MIT?” “I’ve been dancing since I was young” and found it a “great confidence booster.” Convinced that becoming a dancer and sticking with it had been at least partially responsible for her academic success, Toussaint started STEM From Dance, a nonprofit she’s building to help other young women connect dance, science, technology, engineering, and math.
Though the equations and operations you see at school might seem far removed from the rest of the world, mechanical engineers and entrepreneurs in STEM education like Toussaint know that math is responsible for just about every structure and object you see that was designed by human beings. Interested in designing new machines or improving old ones? Dance your way to MIT (STEM from dance!), explore STEM careers at Math4Science, work hard in school, and you may find yourself building structures that save people’s lives.
