Robots, Animals, and Data?
How This Professor is Transforming Biotechnology and Robotics
Everyone knew that Kathryn was destined to become an engineer when her parents found her taking apart the crib as a baby. She always liked numbers and solving problems, so science and math naturally seemed like a good fit. Kathryn even learned coding as a kid by playing a coding computer game.
Her love for STEM persisted into adulthood. As an ambitious and family-oriented woman, Kathryn hoped to create a career that would allow her to prioritize family and continue living in Ohio, where her family has lived for 200 years.
“It was important for me to find the job where I could be the type of mother I wanted to be.”
After her first internship at NASA in, Kathryn knew she was in the right field.
“Finding those other nerds like me was really empowering and exciting for me. I noticed that the people who got the hard and interesting problems had doctoral degrees. So I thought to myself, this is where I want to be.”
While completing her PhD. in Mechanical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), she built a deep appreciation for how programming builds on math to create simulations of real world things. Kathryn’s talent and passion for her work led to a position as post-doctoral researcher at CWRU, changing her perception of data.
“You can also look at data in a totally different way, by giving it colors and shapes. You can transform the data into a beautiful figure that contains a lot of information and see things that you would’ve never noticed before.”
Now, Kathryn has a job as an assistant professor at CWRU, where she teaches research robotics, biology, artificial intelligence, and analysis. Kathryn and her team of graduate researchers identify a biological ability that robots currently cannot accomplish or do well. Her team then looks to animals who possess that biological ability and research the animals’ biological characteristics that allow them to perform those functions.
“We use coding to make a plot of what’s going on with this data and explain a phenomena that wasn’t previously understood. We then try to implement our results on a robot.”
For Kathryn, the process of research, gathering data, and forming conclusions about that data is an exciting puzzle. Far from her days of crib disassembly, Kathryn still enjoys the process of untangling the information and simplifying it. Just as Kathryn formed conclusions in her research, she also learned important truths as she navigated her career as a female leader in STEM.
“When I first started in mechanical engineering, I thought I had to be more like some of the men that I respected in the field. But actually, that’s not true. What unites us is the math and the problem-solving, which are the things we can be passionate about together.”
Kathryn appreciates the importance of diversity of personality and people as something to be celebrated.
“What I like about engineering, is that my best will look different from my colleagues’ best. You don’t have to be afraid of not knowing something. Asking questions is very powerful.”
Kathryn’s career journey has allowed her stay in Ohio and prioritize being a parent, as she had hoped. Her impressive list of published work is a testament to how possible it is to hold true to your own values as you pursue the career of your dreams!
Kathryn Daltorio received a 2012–13 AAUW American Fellowship that funded her doctoral research in mechanical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Her story is told in partnership with AAUW, which has a long history of opening doors for women and girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), from the classroom to Capitol Hill.
This story was written by Stephanie Nweke, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
