When María Castéllo reflects on what first drew her toward open science hardware, she returns to a particular moment that has repeated itself throughout her years of outreach and teaching -the instant when someone peers through a microscope, sees something previously invisible come into focus, and exclaims “a-ha!”
“For me,” she explains, “this is the most amazing moment that you can have doing science with people.”
María is a neuroscientist based in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she serves as an associate professor of research and principal investigator of the Brain Development and Evolution laboratory at the Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable. Her work spans neuroscience research, wellness and brain health, science education, science diplomacy, at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, and society, and public engagement. Over the years, María has built a longstanding commitment to public-facing experimentation and low-cost scientific tools. Through collectives such as ANT – focused on art, neuroscience, and technology, and inspired by a belief that science is more meaningful when people can physically engage with it themselves – she organizes workshops in microscopy, electrophysiology, and neuroscience for children, teens, their teachers, and their families.
It was through this community engagement work that María first encountered GOSH. Over the years that have followed, GOSH has come to provide crucial philosophical and practical supports, connecting her to like-minded makers and hackers, as well as to methodologies, sources, and broader networks that have proven invaluable to her work. For years, her laboratory operated with limited funding, making it difficult for her to access and maintain necessary equipment. Through the GOSH community, however, she made connections that enabled her to source, repair, and adapt hardware to serve the immediate needs of her students and workshop participants, helping her sustain hands-on neuroscience and microscopy programming that might otherwise have remained inaccessible.
Today, María continues to build on those relationships as an elected member of the GOSH Community Council, where she hopes to strengthen opportunities for exchange, collaborative learning, and public-facing engagement across the community.
As GOSH enters its second decade, María hopes the community continues strengthening opportunities for internal exchange and collaborative learning across both regions and specialties. She also sees broader possibilities for GOSH’s public role: because open hardware tools make scientific phenomena materially visible and interactive for nontraditional audiences, she believes communities like GOSH are uniquely positioned to support this kind of public engagement at scale.
“We are distributed all over the world,” she reflects, “so we can do great things.”
