After serving two tours as a Marine in Iraq, Mateo Garcia is delving into a cutting-edge career field he hopes will one day help his comrades suffering from brain injuries.
The 28-year-old Elgin Community College student from Batavia has his sights set on neuroprosthetics and wants to create devices that could compensate for damaged pieces of the brain.
“Hopefully there would be some kind of advancement we could make over the course of the next X amount of years to be able to improve the quality of some of their lives,” Garcia said.
But the developing field wasn’t always on Garcia’s radar.
After high school, he spent nearly two years studying automotive technology at Triton College, but realized the field wasn’t for him.
“As I found out, I love learning the theory of how a car works, but not so much working on a car,” he said.
Despite being just a few credits shy of his associate’s degree, he decided to switch gears and follow his brothers’ footsteps by joining the Marines.
For the four years that followed, Garcia served as an infantry rifleman with an anti-terrorism battalion. Twice, he was deployed to Iraq with the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, and while he never sustained any serious injuries himself, he saw others who weren’t as fortunate.
While in the Marines, Mateo Garcia, front, served two tours of duty in Iraq. (Photo provided by Mateo Garcia)
“Seeing the severity of injuries out there, it just stays with you,” he said.
After four years in the military, he feels he returned to civilian life with greater strength of character.
“I take a lot more things seriously, especially the big things like maintaining my GPA at school, he said. “I don’t like to joke around too much with that stuff. I get a lot of work done and I work very hard at what I do.”
And what he’s doing now takes his full concentration.
In January 2009, he enrolled at Elgin Community College to study electrical engineering with an eye toward eventually working for a defense contractor to improve military technology.
However, a chemistry teacher pointed him in a different direction, encouraging him to enroll in the National Institutes of Health Bridges to the Baccalaureate program to study neuroprosthetics.
Instead of artificial limbs, Garcia wants to create replacement parts for damaged portions of the brain, potentially helping people who suffer from conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, or —in the case of soldiers — traumatic brain injury.
“I started realizing it’s a very underdeveloped field,” Garcia said. “I don’t think there’s as much research going there as there could be, so for me it seems like uncharted territory that would be really rewarding to start exploring.”
Through the Bridges program, which targets populations of students underrepresented in science fields, he takes classes at ECC and worked on a research project with Roosevelt University over the summer.
Daysi Diaz-Strong, coordinator of the Bridges to the Baccalaureate program at ECC, calls Garcia “naturally gifted and talented,” and said the area of neuroprosthetics seems like a perfect fit given his skills in engineering and his background in the Marines.
“All these people are coming back (from war) and some have been hurt, so for him to be able to make a difference in that way is unique and, I think, one of the reasons he’s so motivated,” she said.
After he earns his associate’s degree in December, Garcia hopes to transfer to another school and has his eye on Northwestern University’s biomedical engineering program.
He admits he finds the work challenging, but says that’s part of what makes him want to do more.
“I’ve put so much effort into learning everything I’ve learned,” he said. It’s strange. It’s like being in a desert and you find a pool and you just keep drinking as much as you can, it never quenches your thirst.”
