Lately, there has been a bevy of activity at ELT. Since September 1, 2017, the office has two new faces - Byron Johnson and Isabela Caetano. Their work and collaboration has enabled us accelerate our progress in a dramatic way. It is amazing what doubling/tripling an organization's bandwidth can do.
Byron has joined us for research and operations efforts. As one can see from his bio, he's a smart and capable young professional. But he's more than that. He is amazing at organizing our various efforts and helping us to streamline and tackle them in an efficient manner. Byron has been instrumental in systemizing our research collaboration efforts, as well as our preparations for a Kickstarter in early 2018. Prior to his work at ELIA Life, he worked in Dr. Andrea Li's psychophysics lab at Queens College. He started there while an undergraduate at St. John's University, enrolled in the masters program at Queens College and by the time he graduated he was the lead grad student in the lab. I would often speak with Dr. Li and she would tell me how psyched she was with the student researcher. As he neared graduation she mentioned that she would miss his collaboration, and I asked her for an introduction, on the chance that I could hire such a stellar mind. I did something right and he's onboard!
Isabela is an engineering intern from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). This is her second stint here and it has been a pleasure handing off two projects that require time, effort and an engineering mind. They are 1) a portable light box that will enable people who have a visual impairment to read documents using text capturing and reading software (optical character recognition, OCR), and the prototyping of our keyboard.
It is worth noting that we know Isabela through another former intern, Kelvin Yu, who was one of several interns we have hired over the years from MOUSE (https://mouse.org), a education outfit that helps high school students explore STEM research and development. They are awesome!