Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

I&F Decision Science Assoc. Manager @ Accenture | Applied Scientific Researcher

Micromundo

less than 1 minute read

Published:

We actually did it. Micromundo Chile Spa is a real company now. The idea started as one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations – building affordable microscopes from 3D-printed parts and bringing them to schools so kids could actually see the invisible world around them. Then Start-Up Chile said yes, and suddenly it wasn’t hypothetical anymore. The excitement of getting that funding was immediately followed by the terror of realizing we had to deliver. I’m still deep in my PhD, so the juggling act is intense – one day I’m writing a paper on compressed sensing, the next I’m assembling microscope prototypes and pitching to schools. But watching a kid look through a lens for the first time and genuinely lose their mind over what a leaf looks like up close – that makes all the chaos worth it. Building something from scratch is addictive. Exhausting, but addictive.

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