Scholar-Elect Hana Butler Gutiérrez talks about her work on microstructures and how they enable the development of stronger, lighter and more efficient components.
The world of engineering and design felt like a form of sculpture - one where nature’s principles and perfect designs guide material innovation.
Hana Butler Gutiérrez
Hana Butler Gutiérrez likes tiny things, but she wants to make a big impact. For her MPhil in Micro- and Nanotechnology Enterprise she is looking to deepen her understanding of how micro- and nanostructures influence material performance, with a focus on scalable manufacturing techniques. She believes that microstructures have the potential to revolutionise industries by allowing the development of stronger, lighter and more efficient components.
Hana, who has led an innovative initiative at Brown University to promote women in Engineering, has been working with silicone lattices designed to go inside helmets and absorb the impact of blows to the head. She is collaborating with a bio lab that manufactures cortical spheroids or “mini-brains”, which are composed of thousands of neural cells. They are 200 microns in diameter (similar to the width of three human hairs) and are a good model of the human brain because they contain multiple neural cell types, like astrocytes, neurons and microglia, have capillary-like networks and have similar electrical activity to the brain. Her role is to create a specialised device that delivers precise impulses to the mini-brains using silicone micropillars which she manufactures using micro-moulding techniques. The device functions like a switch, quickly straining the mini-brains.
“The aim is to understand what happens when the brain experiences a traumatic injury,” she says. “I like working on a very small scale, and I want to learn more about how to manufacture tiny things. On the nanoscale, the laws of Physics change. I am doing this MPhil to better understand how it all works,” she adds.
Early years
Hana was born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her mother is Mexican and her father is from the US. They met in Chihuahua, Mexico, when he was on a biking trip, and he moved to Guadalajara soon after. At the time he was a newly qualified doctor, but he changed careers after moving and became a maths teacher. In fact, he taught at Hana’s school, an American school where half the lessons were taught in English. Hana is an only child, but her mother’s family is large so she grew up with lots of cousins and her grandparents lived next door. Her mother has been running a grocery shop since Hana was little. She began by selling nappies and graduated into a broad range of products, working long hours. “She’s a powerhouse,” says Hana who believes she gets her interest in enterprise from her mother.
Hana says she was ‘very resistant’ to reading and maths in her early years. It was only when she was about to start middle school around age 11 when her father made her do an intensive maths course over the summer that she gradually started to show an interest and discovered a natural ability in maths and science. Initially, however, she was more interested in the humanities, got into Hispanic literature and took part in poetry readings. She also studied French from the age of six and was very passionate about learning the language. At age 14, she spent the year at a public boarding school in the French Pyrenees, where she improved her language skills enormously and got her first experience of leaving home.
At school she enjoyed participating in the model UN, track and field and debate club. But little by little, Hana became more interested in science, founding her school’s Physics club where they would host 7 am study sessions and tutor other students in maths.
She says her interest in STEM subjects was boosted by her Physics teacher, Dr Eva, who served as an impressive role model. Dr Eva was the first female STEM teacher Hana had had. She had done a PhD and worked in management consulting before turning to teaching. Being the only girl in her Physics class, having that kind of an ‘iconic’ role model was very important to Hana. It also motivated her to do more to promote girls in STEM herself. Every time she returns to Mexico, Hana still visits Dr Eva.
University
She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she finished school. A lack of opportunities to develop her skills in STEM had lowered her confidence which, combined with the high expectations she had set for herself, meant she was scared to disappoint herself. However, her father and Dr Eva had both studied Mechanical Engineering, and Hana wondered if perhaps she could do it too. So she applied to study Mechanical Engineering at Brown in the US and was awarded financial aid to complete her course.
The start of her course was delayed due to Covid and she began her studies in 2021, meaning she had no summer break. The autumn before, students were told to take one class. Hana opted for Chemistry and studied at home in Mexico. Her first two terms on campus were also spent in Covid confinement. Hana had problems concentrating, felt isolated and found online classes challenging, which further undermined her self-confidence.” It was my lowest point,” she says.
She also knew Engineering was male dominated, but hadn’t realised just how deeply that affected the education system. “Everyone knows women deserve to be in the space, but unless you do something to actively unlearn sexist behaviour, there will always be a sense that girls aren’t naturally geared for STEM, and that’s not true,” she says.
Engineering is hard, for everyone, but Hana proved to herself that she could do it, even when things were tough, which, she says, was often. She states: “You don’t have to feel that STEM comes easy to become a great scientist. What we need are less barriers to enter the field so underrepresented groups can try it for themselves.”
As Covid eased up, she made friends who were able to support each other. She tried other classes in Architecture and Art and found she loved using her hands to sculpt and build things. She learned how to make 3D models on the computer and tried doing research for the first time, working on geometric lattice structures made out of silicone. Her sculpture classes came in handy for doing the moulds in 3D. Hana had found her passion. “It was like fireworks had gone off,” she says. “I had found exactly what I had been looking for and the kind of scientist I wanted to be.”
She learned that designing lattice architectures can create materials that are stiffer, tougher or more energy-absorptive. She says: “This world of engineering and design felt like a form of sculpture – one where nature’s principles and perfect designs guide material innovation.”
Women Build at Brown
In 2023 Hana and a friend started a club called Women Build at Brown, which aimed to get women students into the university’s maker space to learn how to use the tools there. Hana herself had long been excited by the huge workshop, but felt out of place because she didn’t know how to use the tools. Talking to other women, she realised she wasn’t alone. The idea for the club was born.
She and her friend put posters up in the women’s bathrooms and 150 women signed up in the first semester. The club hosted workshops every weekend: one week the group was taught how to use a tool and the following week they built something with it. They’ve created laser-cut earrings, cutting boards, upcycled tote bags and more. “We made fun things, but the real purpose was serious: to gain confidence in our technical skills and provide a sense of community,” says Hana. “The system has alienated women for so long and we wanted to change that.”
Hana graduated in May 2024, but the club is still going strong.
Business ideas
Since graduation, she has been working as a research engineer in a lab on campus. Hana is keen to develop her research into business ideas. One idea she has been working on is a wearable sensor for children who play high-impact sports with head injury risk. The sensor will help parents to understand the severity of any blows their children may have received in real time.
However, this is just the beginning of her entrepreneurial aspirations. By design, her research allows her to be at the cutting-edge of innovation, inspiring many practical applications that she will continue to develop at Cambridge. “I want to make things that people want to use, and I believe that microstructures are the key for better designs, so where better to learn than an MPhil that combines enterprise with micro- and nano structures?” says Hana.
