A native of Bogota, Colombia, Dr. Juan Claudio Nino became infatuated with science and math as a young child. Gravitating to something “less nerdy” than physics, he chose to study mechanical engineering along with his best friend. It was a line from his professor that solidified his choice of study, “If you were to put a piece of steel into a grinding stone and paid attention to the sparks it generates, you could tell the amount of carbon content in that steel.”

Now delving into the land of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Nino helped invent a microchip that operates like a brain. The chip consists of pathways that mimic electric pathways inside the actual brain."

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:20

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

This morning we're going to be talking about the brain again and my guest today on Radio Cade, Dr. Juan Claudio Nino. Welcome, Juan. So Juan, you're originally from Bogota, Colombia. So before we talk about your research and the company and how you're doing, what was it like growing up in Columbia? What were you like as a kid? What were your interests and sort of how did you gravitate towards the research you're doing now?

Dr. Juan: 1:00

Sure. Thank you for having me. I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, and it was a very nice environment that we had. Early on, I was very interested in how things worked, so I would sometimes be very social, but a lot of times I would actually be mesmerized by things and be absorbed by whatever I was playing with, and fairly quickly I became very interested in math and sciences. My father was an engineer, a mechanical engineer, so he was also a professor or a teacher and I would always help him grading and just adding up the different questions and get a total for his exams early on and in school I also became very, I guess, infatuated with sciences and math. Our big influence of that was that the school itself essentially highlighted or promoted those students that were actually good academically basically And this was your score in Bogota? I did all the way to high school in and then my bachelor's in Colombia. So essentially the school was a big influence in the sense that I guess the popular or the important or highlighted students were those academically. So I said, well, okay, let's be good academically. That's basically it. And again, my, my mom and my father also very diligent and responsible and so on. And so the combination of those two fairly quickly pointed me towards stem type of fields and I was going to go to physics, back to high school, going to college, but my best friend at the time said now physics is too nerdy if you will. Um, why don't we do mechanical engineering?

Richard Miles: 2:58

Oh that's definitely not nerdy, right?

Dr. Juan: 3:00

Exactly. It was I guess a sidestep there. So I did, I took multiple classes in, in Columbia, a bachelors is a five year program, so you'd take a lot of credits and I took four courses in materials and I did well but not as good as in my other classes. So I said, well I want to stick to this because I'm not quite good at it I guess. And materials was amazing. I had a, an excellent professor, Professor Tovar